Author Name: Debbie McGowan & Raine O’Tierney
Book Name: Leaving Flowers
Release Date: May 1, 2015
Blurb(s):
Shy and awkward since childhood, Aidan Degas is now a man lost. His twin—Aidan’s other half, Nadia—died tragically young, leaving him with nothing to get him through his days but his job at the prestigious Grand Heights Luxury Apartments and the flowers he lays upon her grave. When Aidan is assaulted on the job by a tenant, it’s the graveyard he turns to for strength and solace.
Patrick loves being assistant groundskeeper at the sprawling cemetery where he tends graves and offers a bit of comfort to mourners. When he sees a sad young man lingering over an old grave, his curiosity is strangely piqued for reasons he doesn’t understand. He’s never done this—struck up a friendship with a mourner. But soon that friendship blossoms into a romance.
It’s not going to be easy for the pair. Aidan is so damaged, like petals crushed in an angry fist, and even with Patrick’s warm heart and Irish charm, it might not be enough to bring him back from the edge.
Pages or Words: 67,000 words
Categories: Contemporary, Fiction, Gay Fiction, M/M Romance, Romance
Excerpt:
Somehow, in spite of the need to go home and shower off the grottiness of digging earth for half a day, Patrick didn’t feel he could take his usual subtle approach. Nadia’s passing was not recent; her grave was not new; yet here was this young man, kneeling at her feet, his eyes closed, hands resting in his lap, oblivious to the sun’s slide from the sky, the increasing briskness of the breeze, Patrick’s presence…
“Hello there,” he said quietly, stopping on the path a few feet away. The man was too far into his own mind to startle. Instead, he slowly came to, his shoulders lifting slightly as he twisted to see what had disturbed his meditation. Patrick smiled. “I’m afraid we’re locking up for the evening.”
“So soon?”
“It’s going on for seven o’clock, sir.”
“Seven…” The man’s voice petered away, his expression indicating he had no idea how long he had been kneeling there. If he doubted Patrick’s word, the confirmation came when the man tried to stand, and staggered, numb-legged. He automatically reached out to steady himself, catching hold of the front of Patrick’s coveralls, and then almost collapsed again, unable to bear his own weight.
Without a second thought, Patrick quickly grasped the man by the forearms to steady him. “There’s no rush now. You just take your time. All right?”
The man nodded and swallowed hard. “Thank you. I only came to leave the tulips.” He gestured toward the vase of closed tulips in front of the grave and in the midst of the red and white carnations.
Patrick kept his hold on the man and looked down at the flowers. “They’re beautiful,” he said. “Really lovely.”
“Thanks. Nadia loved flowers so much.” A glimmer of a happier time lit up the man’s features for just a second, before it was blotted out once more by the heavy cloud of sorrow.
Patrick felt that sorrow in his heart. He wanted to offer comfort, warmth, security, to soothe with his touch, his kiss… Oh my—no, no, Patrick. You’re way over the line. You’re standing at the grave of this man’s wife, and all you can think of is kissing him? But it wasn’t that sort of kiss he had in mind. It wasn’t about passion, or lust; just a desperate desire to take away the pain.
The man seemed a little more steady on his feet and Patrick gently released him. “OK now?”
“I think so.” He took a long, deep breath and exhaled slowly. “Thank you for your patience. I’m sure you’re eager to go home. It can’t be fun working here.”
Patrick shrugged and smiled. “I love my job. Fresh air, peace and quiet—”
“But it’s a cemetery.”
“Well, yeah,” Patrick said, the slightest hint of a chuckle in his words. It was enough to prompt the other man to lift his head. For the first time, his eyes met Patrick’s, and something bloomed inside, a heat radiating from somewhere he couldn’t quite pinpoint. It rose up through his chest, into his throat, filling his mouth and his nose, as he gazed into those incredible steel-gray eyes. There was so much pain there, and loss—anger—and yet there was more, so much more, that Patrick could almost hear the emotion, like a distant cry for help from someone who was drowning.
Sales Links:
Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/528968?ref=b10track
Beaten Track Publishing (Paperback): http://www.beatentrackpublishing.com/shop/proddetail.php?prod=leavingflowers
https://www.allromanceebooks.com/product-leavingflowers-1765734-149.html
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00UY86QUG
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00UY86QUG
About the authors:
DEBBIE MCGOWAN is an author and publisher based in a semi-rural corner of Lancashire, England. She writes character-driven, realist fiction, celebrating life, love and relationships. A working class girl, she ‘ran away’ to London at 17, was homeless, unemployed and then homeless again, interspersed with animal rights activism (all legal, honest ;)) and volunteer work as a mental health advocate. At 25, she went back to college to study social science— tough with two toddlers, but they had a ‘stay at home’ dad, so it worked itself out. These days, the toddlers are young women (much to their chagrin), and Debbie teaches undergraduate students, writes novels and runs an independent publishing company, occasionally grabbing an hour of sleep where she can!
Twitter: https://twitter.com/writerdebmcg
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DebbieMcGowanAuthor and http://www.facebook.com/beatentrackpublishing
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/deb248211
Tumblr: http://writerdebmcg.tumblr.com
LinkedIn: http://uk.linkedin.com/in/writerdebmcg
Google+: https://plus.google.com/+DebbieMcGowan
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4401329.Debbie_McGowan
Website: http://www.debbiemcgowan.co.uk
For Debbie: From your bio ‘My academic specialism is gender and sexual politics and identity’…can you explain what that means exactly? How does it affect your characters and their stories?
Debbie: Never believe an academic who sells a course of study on the premise of ‘you get to watch porn’—which we did, incidentally, but that’s only the start of the story.
In spite of being a fairly intelligent individual, I didn’t do well at school. I left with two O’ Levels (these were the exams we took at age 15-16) in English Literature and Religious Education. I went to college to complete what was, essentially a ‘resit’ year, whereby I doubled the number of O’ Levels I possessed (English Language and Sociology) and left for the world of work.
Nine years, two children and what felt like a whole lifetime of experience later, I returned to education, initially to study English Literature but, realising it wasn’t for me, switched my degree to Applied Social Science. At twenty-five I was a ‘mature’ student, and there were a few of us around the same age who shared the same feeling that we had to grasp this second chance and make the most of it.
In non-academic speak, social science is about figuring out how life works and why, and once we were given a basic grounding in the main theories, we came to choosing the specific areas we wanted to study. I was drawn to a module entitled Gender, Sexuality and Society, offered by my now good friend and fellow academic, Paul Reynolds.
The promised porn (which really is not in the least bit titillating, when you’re critiquing it from a radical feminist perspective) took up only a couple of hours in a year of study that was life-changing for me. The theories and ideas enthralled me; the constant questioning of everything I thought I ever knew about gender and sexuality inspired and perplexed me in equal measure. So many competing ideas, so many contradictions, and it left me with more questions than answers. I read so much my mind was utterly boggled and it took a long time for me to get it into any semblance of order.
In the end, though, Michel Foucault won it for me. I read the three volumes of History of Sexuality, one after the other, cover to cover, and decided here was a man who knew a thing or two. In short, Foucault argued that our understanding of gender and sexuality is socially constructed, fluid and subject to change. Society is a construction so pervasive and complete that those with power can shape every aspect of social life—the institutions, our history, the way we think and speak—including our perception of gender and sexuality.
Knowledge, according to Foucault, is power, and the knowledge we value most is that which favours those who have power, because they defined what knowledge was in the first place. Ordinary people need to be aware of discourse—the narrative of social life as written by those in power—before they can step outside of it; before they can challenge it.
So…ALL OF THIS preamble to explain that, ultimately, studying for my degree changed the way I think, completely. That power people exercise over each other? It’s seductive, invisible. Everything we do is about the exercise of power (either we have it, or we don’t), which means everything we do is political.
Discourse is subtle. It permeates, settles, becomes internalised as ‘just how things are’. It shapes the way we think about the world around us, what we see as acceptable, or not.
And if all of this is true, then consciously or not, the words I write are structured by discourse, and they can either perpetuate those inequalities, or they can challenge them. For instance, even in gay romance, there is a tendency to recreate the gender stereotypes of an opposite-sex relationship in a same-sex relationship (I’m sure there are many real couples who identify with this, but not all). A way to challenge this subtly is to have characters that are not the sum-total of their sexual identity. They are just people, living their lives. Their sexuality/asexuality becomes secondary. It might not even be identified within the narrative. Indeed, it is rarely considered necessary to point out that a character is straight in an M/F romance, so why do we need to in an M/M romance?
So really, I suppose, the short answer to the question would be that my academic background has given me a heightened awareness of the way we construct notions of gender and sexuality, and when I write, this awareness is omnipresent. I don’t believe authors have a moral obligation to only write about certain things in certain ways, but I believe strongly authors must remain aware of the power of fiction to transform lives. It’s why I’m a big fan of happy endings. Life can be miserable enough, but a good, solid happy ending can give us a well-needed lift.
Fiction can also challenge inequality; it can get people thinking about their own beliefs and attitudes. It doesn’t need to be ‘in your face’—who wants to listen an author ranting on their soap box (so to speak)? But subtle shifts in thinking go unnoticed, because they’re gradual, easier to swallow. After all, that’s how discourse works.
Subtlety wins hearts and minds. Now my secret is out!
RAINE O’TIERNEY lives outside of Kansas City with her husband, fellow author, Siôn O’Tierney. When she’s not writing, she’s either playing video games or fighting the good fight for intellectual freedom at her library day job. Raine believes the best thing we can do in life is be kind to one another, and she enjoys encouraging fellow writers! Writing for 20+ years (with the last 10 spent on gay romance) Raine changes sub-genres to suit her mood and believes all good stories end sweetly. Contact her if you’re interested in talking about point-and-click adventure games or about which dachshunds are the best kinds of dachshunds!
Raine: (First of all… I have to follow that?! My writing partner is so damn smart.) All right, I will be short and to the point: This may sound sappy, but…oh, I don’t care! In Debbie I found more than a collaboration partner, I found a dear friend and, honestly, someone I connect with on a subconscious level. Both being students of psychology, we started to joke that we must be meeting each other in Jung’s Collective Unconscious when we’d have exactly the same ideas at the same time or could understand the colors of each other’s ideas without much explanation. When we put words to paper together, it was evident there was something real and raw there, that our thoughts braid together in a way that baffled even our best friends and husbands who’d read all our work—no one could tell our voices apart. I think our beliefs about the world are simple ones: that life can be ugly and cruel, but writing is a safe place, that it can be real and beautiful, that the worlds you build can become as real as the world you live in—and even though I did not study the same things Debs studied… we came to the same conclusions, that subtle is good. That happy is good. That fiction transforms lives.
And what’s strange… Most of what I wrote and most of what she wrote for this blog? We did not see until we combined our parts. Collective Unconscious, man.
Homepage: Raineotierney.com
LGBT Author Interviews: http://raineotierneyhatparty.blogspot.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RaineOTierneyAuthor
Twitter: https://twitter.com/RaineOTierney
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7770350.Raine_O_Tierney
Goodreads Link: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25176624-leaving-flowers
Publisher: Beaten Track Publishing
Cover Artist: Natasha Snow
Tour Dates & Stops:
1-May
4-May
5-May
6-May
7-May
Scattered Thoughts & Rogue Words
8-May
11-May
12-May
The Fuzzy, Fluffy World of Chris T. Kat
13-May
14-May
Vampires, Werewolves, and Fairies, Oh My
15-May
Wicked Faerie’s Tales and Reviews
Rafflecopter Prize: $20 Amazon gift card
Congrats Raine and Debbie, on the release of your new book!
Congratulations on the release of Leaving Flowers! I am looking forward to reading it!
Congrats! Leaving Flowers sounds like an awesome book.
Congrats!
Congrats on the new book!
Congrats on your new book