Welcome to Bluewater Bay! This quiet little logging town on Washington state’s Olympic Peninsula has been stagnating for decades, on the verge of ghost town status. Until a television crew moves in to film Wolf’s Landing, a soon-to-be cult hit based on the wildly successful shifter novels penned by local author Hunter Easton. (Fan blog based on Riptide Publishing's multi-author series.)
I haven’t been a good role model.” Ace teared up. “I still believe in love. I loved your mother. You never got to see us together, but I think maybe if you had, you wouldn’t still be living over the garage. At any rate, I haven’t given up. If the opportunity presented itself, or I should say when—”
“Pop. No. God. We have enough to worry about without either of us getting involved with someone new.” Nash ignored Ace’s frown and clasped his hand. “Anyhow, I’m not so sure your expectations are exactly reasonable in my case. Things are . . . They’re different for guys like me, Pop. I’m not looking for a pretty girl in a summer dress. It’s not going to be picket fences and Christmas trees in the window. Bluewater Bay is a small town, and—”
“But you can have what I had. Washington’s a marriage-equality state. You could have it all here. A nice home and a husband. A family of your own. You could make it work.”
Nash’s unruly imagination conjured Spencer wearing designer jeans, a cashmere sweater, and a smile like pure oxygen. Happiness exploded in his belly, filling him with unfamiliar longing.
He ruthlessly shook off the image. “Not everyone has the same dream.” He pulled the napkin from his lap and tossed it down on the table. His father made things sound so easy: find a man who wants those things and settle down.
Like they grow on trees.
“Then what’s your dream? Tell me so I can help you achieve it.
Welcome to the Riptide Publishing/L. A. Witt blog tour for Rain Shadow, the latest installment in the multi-author Bluewater Bay series! Rain Shadow Author: L.A. Witt Reviewer: B. Rating: A- What I…
“Divorced, bitter, and lonely in self-imposed exile in Bluewater Bay, Jeremy Rose has a lot on his mind. His job as bodyguard has become increasingly stressful, his client’s unraveling relationship with her girlfriend is a constant reminder of his own failed marriage, and he thinks his kids hate him. Finding a gorgeous man in his age group who is also averse to anything beyond a casual hookup or two is more than he dared hope for. But, that’s exactly what counselor Scott Fletcher is offering—which suits Jeremy just fine. After all, surely the very last thing he needs now is to fall in love. Right?
Rain Shadow is the story of Jeremy Rose, a (fairly) recently divorced father of two teenagers who is the current bodyguard for the director of “Wolf’s Landing,” the fictional television series filming in Bluewater Bay. One of the better “late bloomer” stories I’ve read, it explores the painful difficulties Jeremy must face after he realizes, and stops denying that, he’s gay. Telling himself that being alone is what’s best for his children, who still live with their mother in LA, he has explored his sexuality through one-night stands and brief hookups, never letting anyone get too close.
Scott Fletcher, a Marriage and Family counselor, is also determinedly single, having lost the man he loved many years before in a tragic accidental shooting. Since his partner was a policeman who was killed in the line of duty, Scott has sworn off dating men with dangerous jobs, thereby making Jeremy’s vocation a deal breaker. Their situation would be perfect if they weren’t lying to themselves about how much they’ve come to need one another.
L.A. Witt is a familiar author to me by now, and I can’t think of anything she’s written that I haven’t liked. Rain Shadow is no exception. She addresses Jeremy and Scott’s situation without unintentional awkwardness or resorting to the use of cartoonishly earnest protagonists. Issues of denial, honesty, love in its many forms, and even the fact that sex still happens after the age of twenty-eight are all addressed with an understated frankness that made becoming invested in this story very easy to do. Scott and Jeremy’s tale can absolutely be taken as a statement, but not a sermon. And I thought it worked extremely well.
That’s not to say that Rain Shadow is without drama. It has plenty, all of it the wince inducing, close call variety that makes for interesting, but not easy, romance. Jeremy’s denial over the realities of his problems with his kids, and his unwillingness to acknowledge that he might be wrong continued to escalate throughout the story. Every time I readied myself for the confrontation that would clearly be necessary in order for any kind of resolution to begin, only to find it was somehow defused, my anxiety grew. When things really did start falling to pieces, I was exhausted. Which I loved in the masochistic way of many ardent readers.
The Bluewater Bay series has been a favorite of mine for some time now, its authors addressing a refreshingly diverse range of topics and personalities with straightforward, openhearted creativity that is both important and unique. Rain Shadow continues that tradition beautifully. Scott and Jeremy’s connection was both tender and undeniably provocative, as well as being easy to believe. The return of some of my favorite characters from other stories in the series certainly didn’t hurt, and I was extremely glad to see them again. While Rain Shadow can be read as a standalone without any trouble, I highly recommend reading the entire series, if possible. These really are wonderful stories, and I know that my own appreciation for the denizens of Bluewater Bay continue to grow with each one.
It’s amazing how close one can get to a Roosevelt Bull Elk in the Olympic National Forest. They seem to be fully aware of the fact that there is no hunting allowed. This huge elk was all of eight feet away from me, and didn’t seem the slightest bit phased that I was there. Odds are, he’s seen his share of humans holding cameras and has grown accustomed to having his picture taken. The only time I’d suggest avoiding getting this close to a bull elk is during the rut, when their testosterone levels spike and they battle one another for control of a herd.
This is a false color image from Landsat 5 showing the rain shadow in Oregon caused by the Cascade Mountain Range. A rain shadow is the result of warm moisture laden air being pushed up the windward side a tall terrestrial body such as a mountain range, a condition known as “orographic lifting”. As the air rises it becomes cooler and cooler until it precipitates on the windward side. After the air loses its moisture it continues up and over the mountain range by which time there is little to no moisture left to precipitate. One of the most extraordinary rain shadows on Earth is on the South Island of New Zealand. On the western side of the Southern Alps anywhere from 6,300-8,900 mm (250-350 in) of water (or snow at higher altitudes) precipitates per year. On the eastern side of the mountain range, yearly precipitation falls to less than 760 mm (30 in) and in some areas its half that. Do you live in a rain shadow? -NF
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=79247&src=fb
According to Norse mythology, the first humans, Ask and Embla, were formed out of two pieces of driftwood, an ash and an elm, by the god Odin and his brothers, Vili and Vé.
Today on Love Bytes we have author L.A. Witt with her blog tour for Rain Shadows. Thanks for joining us here, L.A. Blurb: Jeremy Rose came to Bluewater Bay to work as Anna Maxwell’s bodyguard…
“Older Characters vs Younger Characters
Rain Shadow, like a number of books I’ve written in the last couple of years, does not feature twenty-something lads with six-packs and the endurance of an entire rugby team. Lately, my boys have been heading well into their forties. I still write the younger guys, of course, but there’s something to be said for the finely-aged gentlemen.
Writing older guys is definitely different, particularly in LGBT books. Of course they have more experience with the world in general, but that doesn’t necessarily apply to their experience with other men. Some guys have been out for decades. Some, though, don’t figure it out until later. Maybe they were raised in a homophobic environment. Maybe they were just scared. Maybe they were in denial.
So sometimes, you wind up with an older guy who doesn’t have a lot of experience with men. Jeremy, the protagonist of Rain Shadow, is in his early forties, but has only been involved with men since his divorce three years ago. He knew he was gay before that, but denial kept him in the closet. That, and he and his wife worried about how a divorce would affect their kids, so they tried—with disastrous results—to stay together.
Scott, on the other hand, has been out for over twenty years. Same with some of the guys in my other books. Rick and Jon from Not Safe For Work are both in their mid-forties and have been out for quite a while. Ethan and Rhett from The Distance Between Us have been out for at least fifteen years.
But there are others like Jeremy, too. Greg from my current work-in-progress, To Live Again, has been married for twenty-five years, but now that he’s (rather unexpectedly) divorced at forty-seven, he figures now’s as good a time as any to explore those fantasies he’s been keeping a secret all this time. Like Jeremy, he has loads of life experience—they’re both parents of mostly grown kids, they’ve got years of marriage under their belts, not to mention long term careers—but when it comes to dudes? Totally new.
So that’s a fun thing to explore—the older guy who’s relatively recently come out of the closet, trying to navigate a different kind of sex life and a different kind of relationship. There’s a sense of having more to lose, I guess. They’ve got careers and families to think about, where a younger guy might be a bit less established and set in his ways. The younger guy might be more willing to take a risk on a potentially disastrous relationship, or make some huge life change like moving across the country, where an older one might balk because . . . I mean, seriously. Do you know how much work it is to move across the country at the drop of a hat? And jumping into a relationship that could quite possibly go down in flames . . . exhausting.
Also, the older guys tend to creak and groan a bit more during sex scenes. Which can actually be funny. Nothing spices up a roll in the hay like “Was that your back or my knee that just popped?”
The list could go on and on, and obviously nothing is universal, but those are just some interesting tidbits about older versus younger characters.
So what say you, readers? Do you like them young and wild? Or finely-aged?”
