Blog Tour Stop including Excerpt, Author Q&A and Giveaway - Would I Lie To You? by Brad Vance ~ BFD Book Blog

Author Name: Brad Vance

Book Name: Would I Lie To You?
Series: The Game Players
Book: One

Release Date: April 24, 2015

Blurb(s):

Software billionaire Marc Julian’s orderly life is shattered one night by a cyber-intrusion into his company’s servers. He’s always surrounded himself with the best people, but finding the culprit behind this might require a real expert…and sometimes it takes a thief to catch a thief.

Jesse Winchester and his team of “grey hat” hackers are suddenly available to Marc. Marc doesn’t know if he should trust Jesse with the keys to his company’s kingdom. After all, Jesse’s a convicted felon, sent to prison for violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. A felon sentenced to thirty-five years in prison, who mysteriously served only three years before being released…

Marc’s first company, his whole life, was shattered because he trusted the wrong person. This time there’s even more at stake, but few other options. Especially when his evil enemies, the billionaire industrialist Krom brothers, are revealed to be the source of the intrusion.

Is Jesse there to help Marc, or does he have his own history with the Kroms, his own score to settle? As Jesse and Marc spend more time together, their growing intimacy is at war with their need to win their respective battles. Soon the game they start to play with each other, against each other, becomes more exciting, more exquisitely frustrating…and more dangerous.

Pages or Words: 289 pages

Categories: BDSM, Crime Fiction, M/M Romance, Thriller, Cybercrime

Excerpt:

He’d made a mistake with Marc. He’d thought they could play a game together, to pass the time, let off steam, release stress. Marc was smart enough to know that that’s all it was.

Right?

But the look on his face, when Jesse said goodbye… The shock. The disappointment. The…

Say it. The hurt. That was when Jesse knew that for Marc, it had been more.

That was when Jesse knew that it had been more for him, too.

Sales Links: (Amazon exclusive) http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00WNMVKZC

About the author:

Brad Vance writes gay romance, erotica and paranormal stories and novels, including the breakout hits “A Little Too Broken” and “Have a Little Faith in Me.”

Q&A with Brad:

Q: Let’s get the nasty question out of the way first…what happened with Amazon’s censorship? It looks like the whole series is available there now. Have you had any other issues with them?

A: Oh boy. Well, it’s hard to say exactly what happened. I can guess, though. For those who don’t know, a new trend in erotica started up earlier this year around “stepbrothers.” And amazingly enough, Amazon was letting these stories through their massive smutblocking apparatus. With adult websites like hdpornmovies picking up the smut slack while all these other hot stories have been previously blocked with their arousing video content to sate the demands of our readers. Amazon’s always blocked stories about incest, and a year or two ago it started blocking what was called PI or “pretend incest,” which was usually about stepdaddies or stepmommies. There is a huge demand for this kind of edgy stuff out there, but Amazon’s been so obsessed with what a single bluenose in Arkansas might object to, that they’ve come down hard on anything resembling it.

Suddenly, though, “stepbrothers” were okay. Stories with stepbrother in the title, even, were going through the review process. All of us erotica writers were baffled, but excited. So I jumped on the trend with the first story in my series, “Kyle’s New Stepbrother.” And it did great! I immediately put out another in the series…and it got blocked. The thing with Amazon is, they never tell you why, beyond that you have “content in violation” of their very vague guidelines. Those guidelines only say that what they ban is “about what you’d expect.” What who would expect? Not me…Again, there’s that bluenose in Arkansas, hard at work terrifying a multibillion dollar corporation.

So all I could do was guess what the problem was, and ask seasoned veterans of the war against Amazon what it might be. I was told the cover was too hot – it had two guys in bed, one over the other (nothing shown below the waist). Or it could have been the “sleep sex,” in which Kyle creeps up from the bottom of Nick’s bed to surprise him with a blow job. Or it could have been the raunchy blurb. Amazonology is like Kremlinology, you can only guess from who’s standing on the platform that day with Premier Bezos as to what they are or aren’t going to allow from one day to the next. And I have no idea why #1 went through, with a dirty blurb, and two guys being pretty intimate on the cover, but #2 didn’t…and so I’ve never dared to touch #1 again, to make any changes at all, not even to add the links to the rest of the series, for fear it’ll explode if I touch it!

Then we all discovered the strangest thing of all. Stepfucking stories that were classified as “romance” were going through the review process…but stories classed as “erotica” were not. The content didn’t matter, just the classification. So I responded to the “you’re blocked” form letter with an appeal – can I resubmit with changes? I got the next form letter in return that said, you can resubmit as a new book, and we’ll review it. So basically, I removed everything listed above that I thought might be the reason it was blocked, and resubbed as Romance, and hey presto! It worked! And I’ve had no problem with the rest of the series. If you read the blurbs, they’re super sweet romantic captions, and the twins I harvested from Depositphotos almost never even touch, let alone look like they’re about to have sexy time. The stories are pure filth, of course! But that’s our little secret, mkay?

It’s ridiculous. But that’s Amazon for you.

Q: Which of your books is your favorite? Which was the hardest to write?

A: “Apollo’s Curse” is my favorite. I set myself to do a “meta romance,” a romance about romances, like the old ones that end with a kiss on the last page. It’s about a writer who’s touched by the Muse and can suddenly write bestseller after bestseller…but only romances, and only for a year. After which he’ll never write again, not even a grocery list. It’s about the creative process, what writers are willing to sacrifice – including love – to make something wonderful. I think it’s a great book. If it wasn’t gay, and, more shameful than that, self published, I think it would have done really well in the wider world.

The hardest to write was “The Worst Best Luck.” I’ve never given anyone as miserable a childhood and early romantic experiences as I gave to Peter Rabe. I’ve been in exactly the kind of emotionally abusive/manipulative relationships that Peter was in, and it was gut wrenching to relive all that. It’s all fuzzy bunnies and kittens for me after that!

Q: Which authors have influenced your writing or your career?

A: Omigod, well, I’ll focus on who’s influencing me now. Dorothy Dunnett is a wonderful historical fiction writer. She has two series set in the Renaissance, and the “House of Niccolo” books have been a huge influence on the relationship between Marc and Jesse in “Would I Lie to You?“. The Niccolo books feature this long, twisty, love-hate relationship between Nicolas and Gelis – Nicolas was in love with, and responsible for the death of, Gelis’ sister, so the two of them embark on this long game, in which Gelis punishes Nicolas in Byzantine ways and Nicolas accepts it…but they’re also in love at the same time, so there’s this whole love/hate dynamic in everything they do. They’re both incredibly smart and ambitious and, well, interesting.

I could never, ever remotely compare myself to her as an author, but I was fascinated by the idea of two brilliant, angry people, and this long game they play together…because of the circumstances, but also because, shit, just fuckin’ on page one and then angsting about it for three hundred pages is boring. People that smart are easily bored. You can’t have a partner at that intellectual level without putting a lot of work into not letting the other person lose interest. Marc and Jesse are definitely in it for the long game.

Q: Do you have any works-in-progress you want to tell us about?

A: Oh yeah, I’ve got a full pipeline! The next book is a standalone about Ryan the Escort, a secondary character in “Would I Lie to You?” He was never meant to be anything other than a guy on the first two pages who then disappears forever…but he kept coming back into the story, and just developed into this character that I love, and the fans love. So he gets a short novel. Then of course, it’s the next Marc and Jesse book. I have no idea what they’re up to next, or where they’re going, so I need to fight against all my “jump up run” tendencies and take my time, and make sure that #2 is as exciting and satisfying as #1.

After that, I’m kicking around a novel about a “good cop,” and I keep seeing all these sexy hipster pix that make me want to do my first shifter stories… “Werewolves of Brooklyn.” Someday…

Q: If you could visit anywhere in the world to get inspiration for a story, where would you go?

A: Wow, there’s so many places in Europe I want to go; I’ve been to London and Paris but I want to see all of it. But for inspiration for a novel, I’d pick Austria and Hungary – I’ve got a novel I set aside about a gay prince and a bad-boy king, rulers of two imaginary kingdoms, a country that split up after WWII in capitalist/communist, but the communist country restored their monarchy after the fall of the Wall. I sort of converted an area of Austria-Hungary into those kingdoms. It might be too silly of an idea, I know. It came from an article on the most popular categories on Netflix, which included Europe, Royalty and Weddings. So I cracked wise to a friend of mine and said, “Shit, if I want to make some money, my next novel should be about two gay European princes who get married!” Total joke. Then the story started to develop! I don’t know if I’ll ever do it, but I’d love to do the research in person!

Where to find the author:

Facebook: www.facebook.com/brad.vance.10

Facebook Author Page: www.bradvanceerotica.wordpress.com

Twitter: www.twitter.com/BradVanceAuthor

Google: https://plus.google.com/u/1/+BradVance/about