NBtM Tour + #Giveaway: Lovesick Titans by Amanda Meuwissen @MissSuperCube @GoddessFish

Lovesick Titans

by Amanda Meuwissen

GENRE: Gay Romance, Superhero

BLURB:

Not even a Titan can always stand up to a God.

Malcom Cho is in over his head, wrapped up in a love affair with his superhero nemesis Zeus, who most people in Olympus City only know as Detective Danny Grant.

Lovesick Titans begins where Lovesick Gods left off, after a heist gone wrong that ended with a museum guard dead and Mal and Danny beaten and exhausted from their fight with the new threat in town, Cassidy Ludgate—Hades.

Unaware that Ludgate’s true motivation is revenge for the death of his father at Zeus’s hands, Mal wants only to keep Danny close, while Danny races to solve the cases surrounding Ludgate to stop him from whatever he has planned for them next.

What Mal doesn’t know is that Danny didn’t pursue him with the purest of intentions but sought to break his heart in retaliation for not being there when he needed him in the fight against Thanatos. Even though Danny no longer seeks that end, the lies between them loom like a shadow about to descend upon them both.

And Hades has only begun to toy with them…

Excerpt:

Danny let Mal hold his hand in place on his arm, while his other hand strayed, drifting down to Mal’s hip and resting at the edge of one of his larger scars. Mal had many, from years of abuse and a hard way of living. Normally, when Danny touched one, he pushed on with confidence, but tonight, the raised scar tissue made him snap to his senses like he’d been in a trance.

“Sorry,” he said and pulled both hands away.

But Mal reached for them, hung onto them, and brought Danny’s hands back to his skin. “It’s okay. Broken bottle one night when Dad got drunk. Now I get to add another knife wound to the collection.” Mal smirked as he nodded at his bandaged arm.

Danny smiled with him, but it was a sad, shattered expression. He teased the tips of his fingers over the scar tissue. “Are all these really from…” With a startle, he tried to pull away again as if he’d said something he shouldn’t.

“My father?” Mal said, refusing to let him go. “Not all. Most though. Some are from prison. Some dumb mistakes. Fights like tonight. But most…yeah, they’re his.”

Taking Danny’s hand still resting on his hip, Mal drew it upwards, guiding it across his bare chest until he reached his shoulder and the faint circular scar tissue near his clavicle. 

“Freezer burn. From his powers. Because I broke my leg when I was eight and I cried. He wanted to teach me a lesson. Teach me how to keep pain in and never let anyone see it. So he held the tip of a frozen finger there until it burned.”

Danny’s brow furrowed with indignant anger. 

Mal trailed the hand lower to a particularly bad scar across his stomach—his worst and the one he remembered the clearest. “First knife wound. Caught me with a boy in my room. Would have killed him if I hadn’t stood in the way. I took the brunt of it. Let him run off. Never brought a boy home again, not ‘til Dad was gone. Brought a couple girls home,” he shrugged.

“Girls?” Danny asked with a touch of humored skepticism bleeding through his concern. He splayed his hand flat against Mal’s stomach, warm and intimate in his touch.

“Occasionally. Not as often.”

Danny nodded but his smile quickly faded, his eyes trained on the scar and the affectionate way he traced it with his fingers. “Sometimes…I think my dad hates me because…” he trailed and the motion of his hand slowed. “There’s something I never told you. About the night I killed Thanatos.”

The smile dropped from Mal’s lips as well as he waited for Danny to continue. 

“He killed my mom.”

Interview with Amanda Meuwissen

Can you tell us a little bit about the characters in Lovesick Titans?

Lovesick Titans starts where Lovesick Gods left off and continues through to the end of the series. The characters at this point are in a very unstable place. As hero (Danny) and villain (Mal) in most of the city’s eyes, the two protagonists have just finished facing off together against the real villain of the story—Hades. Their injuries in the fight led to more intimacy between them than they had yet shared when their relationship was supposed to be no-strings-attached sex to blow off steam—which Danny had actually offered as a way to get Mal back for not showing up to help him defeat another villain 6 months earlier. Danny had planned to get Mal to fall in love with him just to break his heart, but now that love seems to be going both ways, and Danny feels so awful about it, he isn’t sure what to do. That conflict combined with the threat of Hades on their tail and Danny’s constant struggle with depression has everything on a razor’s edge. What’s tragic but exciting about this concluding book to the series is that I have to bring our ‘heroes’ to the breaking point, rock bottom, in order to raise them back up and find common ground once all the lies between them are out in the open. It’s very complex, as are their feelings for each other, which I think mirrors reality more than people might realize at first glance given the fantastical setting.

Can you tell us a little bit about your next books or what you have planned for the future?

The current book I’m writing shares some similar setting aspects to Lovesick, since it too deals with superheroes and villains, but the tone, the characterizations, the themes, etc., are very different, though the protagonist does deal with social anxiety in a very real and relatable way just as I have Danny in Lovesick dealing with bipolar depression. That new book—After Vertigo—is nearly complete with its first draft and then I’ll be refining it before sending it to my publisher. It has the heroic protagonist falling for a dastardly thief, which may seem similar at first glance to Lovesick, but I assure readers, it is anything but. Our hero in this case has no powers but strives to prove they aren’t necessary to stand up to the villains threatening his city, even if he is a bit shy, socially awkward, and unsure how to respond to the advances of the thief he blackmails into helping him.

How long would you say it takes you to write a book?

I wrote the first draft of the Lovesick Series, which was ultimately split into two books, in six months, but I spent another several months editing. The initial writing process happens very quickly for me, usually a chapter a week, especially during NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) when I strive for close to 2000 words a day. I can write a 50k book in a month, usually closer to two months when it’s not NaNo, though often my books are a little longer than that. My goal is to publish at least one book a year, and I’ve been veering closer to two lately.

What is your favorite childhood book?

The Dark is Rising series, specifically The Grey King, which is the fourth book in the series, but I accidentally read it first when I was about ten. I later read the whole series from the beginning, but Bran, one of the main characters in Grey King, remains my favorite. Maybe because of his secret lineage, his albino coloring that set him apart, being the only Welsh main character when the other children are English, but it was one of those fantasy rich series that felt timeless, reading it in the 90s when it was written in the 50s. It’s very much Harry Potter meets Lord of the Rings long before Harry Potter existed, and adds in Arthurian legend, which is a weakness of mine.

If you could spend the day with one of the characters from Lovesick Titans, who would it be? Please tell us why you chose this particular character, where you would go and what you would do.

I’d love to spend a day with Mal. He’s the thief with a heart of gold type, and I describe his neighborhood and how important he is to the people there (all of which know he’s a famous criminal) very in-depth, so I’d love to accompany him on his rounds of the local businesses. It looks like he’s checking in for protection money when he does this, but that’s not how he works. He honestly cares and checks in to make sure no one needs anything, isn’t being hassled, etc. In exchange, without ever having to ask, the people keep an eye out for police and tend to give him gifts, like donuts from the bakery, etc. I’d love to just accompany Mal while he’s out doing that, meet those people, get to know him better too, guarded as he usually is with strangers, and end at his favorite bar to get dinner and a drink before inevitably Danny would join us.

What was the hardest scene from Lovesick Titans to write?

There’s a lot of action in this second book, a lot of close calls and big climactic fights—both physically and verbally. But I think even more difficult was finding the right balance of emotion, what to say and not say, when dealing with Danny’s rock bottom moment with his depression and thoughts of suicide. It’s something we often shy away from talking about, and I didn’t want to do that. I was very thankful for my editor who also wanted to be sure I wasn’t avoiding saying the word—suicide—and just implying it, which is so easy but what also often leads to erasure of the problems we should feel comfortable discussing and not feel ashamed. So that was particularly important to get just right and therefore the most challenging.

What made you want to become a writer?

I’ve answered this question a lot, often with the same anecdote, but what it comes down to is wanting to connect with people, wanting to reach them at their lowest and give them hope, or show them a mirror into humanity that reminds them of how good life and other people can be. That’s what reading has always meant to me, so that’s what I want my writing to be for others and what makes being an author so rewarding.

Just for fun

(a Favorite song: Impossible for me, as it changes all the time, I consume too much music too often, but if I had to choose a song of the moment… “Running Home to You” performed by Grant Gustin for The Flash musical episode on the CW.

(b Favorite book: Good Omens

(c Favorite movie: The Fifth Element

(d Favorite tv show: Lucifer

(e Favorite Food: Boneless chicken wings with various sauces but blue cheese to dip them in

(f Favorite drink: Dr Pepper

(g Favorite website: Archive of our Own, though I frequent Tumblr more

Thanks so much for visiting with us today!

AUTHOR Bio and Links:

Amanda Meuwissen has been writing and posting online for many years, including maintaining the website and blog for the software company Outsell. She is an avid writer and consumer of fiction through film, prose, and video games, and is the author of the paranormal romance trilogy The Incubus Saga and young adult novel Life as a Teenage Vampire. Amanda lives in Minneapolis, MN, with her husband, John, and their two cats.

Amazon ~ Website ~ Tumblr ~ Goodreads ~ Facebooks ~ Twitter

Giveaway:

$25 Amazon/BN GC

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