In honor of the release of
Like It or Not, I've got a guest blog post on It's Raining Men about non-con/dub-con:
Gryvon on Grey Consent and Like It or NotLike It or Not is currently available for sale. Here's the an excerpt from my story,
What It's Worth:
He hated his agent.
Bernadette had found him. At the time, with one book on the shelves and a few articles out in a handful of lesser-known magazines, he'd barely thought about getting an agent. He knew he should, at some point. He knew that it would be useful to have one to handle all the things he was horrible at, but that was all he'd thought about it until Bernadette had called. She'd given him the sales pitch and promised many wonderful things. He'd said no, thinking it was some kind of scam. She'd insisted. He'd hung up. There was a process to that sort of thing, a process that Bernadette ignored because she liked the way he wrote and saw potential. She'd called his parents. Apparently, she knew his uncle. His parents had told him how nice it was that he was working with a family friend, and somewhere in the midst of all of that, she'd become his agent.
He regretted it every day.
It wasn't that she was bad at her job. She was the best. She got him amazing deals with top publishers. Big name guys, not just the academic presses he'd been dealing with. She'd gotten his name out there and also gotten him this job.
Which he hated. Mostly. Sometimes. There were some parts of it that weren't all bad. It paid his bills and gave him healthcare.
As much as he hated having to deal with Ellen and Larry, drab cubicles, and all of the office gossip, there was one thing about his job that he really loved. He got to write about truly interesting people: people who existed beyond the normal dull and dreary spectrum and shined. People not like him. People who lived their lives like it mattered, like there was one thing they were born to do and so they were out doing it. He got that, kind of. It was like him and writing, and yet the people that he talked to all made it sound so amazing. It was never amazing to them—to them it was ordinary, mundane—but to him it was spectacular.
That was how he ended up meeting a man rumored to be one of the most notorious gangsters in Chicago's history.