Love’s Opening Night by Jeff Adams
Dreamspinner Press
Cover Artist: AngstyG
Available for Purchase at
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Scattered Thoughts and Rogue Words is happy to have Jeff Adams here today answering questions and talking about his latest release, Love’s Opening Night. Welcome, Jeff.
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Hi! I’m Jeff Adams and I’m trilled to be here on Scattered Thoughts and Rogue Words to talk about my latest novella, Love’s Opening Night, which comes from Dreamspinner Press on December 28.
Where do you normally draw your inspiration for a book from? A memory, a myth, a place or journey, or something far more personal?
Not surprisingly, I suppose, it varies from story to story. For Love’s Opening Night, I wanted to set something on Broadway and the idea of taking a ensemble cast member, Jeremy Steele, with a long-standing crush on the lead, Ty Beaumont, and turning it into something more sounded fun. I love theater as much as I do hockey and I enjoyed leaving hockey behind for at least this one story (this is one of the few stories I’ve written that has no mention of the sport in it). You’ll see my love of musicals all over the story as I make reference to several favorites.
It mirrored real life a bit too. My husband and I met while we were doing a play for a local community theatre. Over the course of rehearsals and performances we starting dating. More than twenty years later we’re still enjoying our happily ever after.
Are you a planner or a pantser when writing a story? And why?
This has changed over the course of my writing career. When I began I pantsed all the way. Over time, however, I moved more towards planning. These days I know the course of the book and what needs to happen in each scene. However there’s plenty of room for the story to grow organically as well. For example, there’s a scene where Jeremy gets a little jealous about a reporter from a local TV station. I’d planned for the jealously, but who the reporter actually turns out to be was a lot of fun to write and something I hadn’t planned up front.
Contemporary, supernatural, fantasy, or science fiction narratives or something else? Does any genre draw you more than another when writing it or reading it and why does it do so?
For the most part I’m drawn to contemporary stories as I like to read about romanticized real life and that’s what I tend to write. But I try to read broadly too, so I’ll give sci-fi and paranormal a go every now and then, especially if a book comes highly recommended or it’s blurb catches my eye.
I’d like to try to write something sci-fi someday if I can wrap my brain around how to do the world building correctly.
Can a author have favorites among their characters and do you have them?
Oh, yes an author can do this. It may not be nice, but I do it. For me, it’s Simon from my Hat Trick series (see, there’s hockey rearing its head). He grew so much from a closeted, but in love, high school senior in to a caring, lovingly committed adult graduating college across the three book/three short story series, that I think he’ll be my favorite character forever.
If you were to be stranded on an island or snowbound somewhere, what books/authors would you take to read?
A must would be Z.A. Maxfield’s St. Nachos books as well as Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (which is my favorite book ever) plus books from David Levithan and Geoff Knight’s Fathom’s Five series. Those, I think, could get me through anything.
How early in your life did you begin writing?
I was published in my middle school’s literary journal in seventh grade and I poked around with creative writing through high school and college. After few years after college, a friend and I co-founded a literary magazine (The First Line, which still exists today). I left the magazine after a few years to focus on my own writing and here I am today. I love that I spend a few hours every day crafting stories.
Were you an early reader or were you read to and what childhood books had an impact on you as a child that you remember to this day and why?
My mom read to be a lot as a child. All the Winnie The Pooh books were wonderful (a prized possession is a first edition from the 1920s of one of the Pooh books. Charlotte’s Web was powerful and I was crushed when Charlotte dies at the end. There were a lot of Harold and the Purple Crayon stories too. He reading to me turned me into a reader. I’ve been reading ever since. Sometimes not as much as I want, but there’s always a book in progress.
Thanks so much for hanging out with me for a few minutes. If you have any questions for me, please leave them in the comments and I’ll stop back to answer over the next few days.
I hope everyone enjoys Love’s Opening Night as much as I did writing it. Please check out the Rafflecopter below for your chance to win an ebook copy.
About LOVE’S OPENING NIGHT
Can an onstage love story lead to a real-life romance?
Jeremy Steele is a veteran Broadway performer. For his latest role, he’s dancing alongside a man he’s fantasized about for years, TV star Ty Beaumont. Jeremy knows better than to get involved with a castmate, but when Ty has trouble learning the complicated choreography, Jeremy offers to lend a hand. When a rehearsal kiss turns into something more, Jeremy can’t help but wonder what a celebrity like Ty could ever see in a Broadway chorus boy like him. Will a relationship with his crush make it past previews, or can it become a long-running hit?
Release date: December 28, 2016
About the Author
Jeff’s written stories since he was in middle school and became a gay romance writer in 2009 when his first short stories were published. Since then he’s written several more shorts and novels, including some in the young adult genre, and he plans to keep writing as long as wonderful readers keeping picking up his books.
Jeff lives in rural Northern California with his husband of twenty years, Will. Some of his favorite things include the musicals Rent and [title of show], the Detroit Red Wings and Pittsburgh Penguins hockey teams, and the reality TV competition So You Think You Can Dance. If forced to pick his favorite book it would be a tie between Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and David Levithan’s Every Day.
Jeff is also the co-host of Jeff & Will’s Big Gay Fiction Podcast.
- Website: http://jeffadamswrites.com
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AuthorJeffAdams
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/hockeyguynyc
Giveaway
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