A Warm Welcome to author Charlie Cochrane visting Love Bytes to talk about Lessons For Survivors , a new release at Riptide Publishing.

She talks about different sort of hero’s  and there is a giveaway to participate in 🙂

Writing about a different sort of romantic hero

 

I guess when most of us think of a romantic hero, we go for something along the “Colin Firth in Pride and Prejudice” lines. Tall, handsome, dashing, with a bit of attitude. (Or, in the case of one of my childhood pin ups, Dr Kildare; mean, moody and medicinal.) And he always gets the girl in the end, even if it seems at one point in the story arc like he’s burned his bridges or she thinks he’s a pain in the elbow.

 

So, what if your hero doesn’t want to sweep a Jane Eyre or Elizabeth Bennett off her feet? What if he’d prefer Rochester or Darcy?

 

I write gay romance. If you want to know why, and that’s an entirely valid question to ask, it’s because they’re the stories which come into my head. They’re stories I like to read, too – assuming (as I assume for any book I buy) they’re well written and the characters are engaging. It’s a burgeoning market, with plenty of genres of story available and it’s proving popular among both men and women readers, even though (as with other parts of the romance market) the quality can be a bit variable. It’s the highlight of my day to get an e-mail from a gay man saying that he didn’t realise there were any books telling “his” story and how delighted he’d been to find some.

 

Having said all that, writing gay romance restricts your number of potential customers as not everyone wants to read a same sex story, no matter how good the plot or characterisation. I have a degree of sympathy (my stories are pretty innocent, but some readers can get turned off by too much anatomical detail!) However, I’d defy anyone to find anything offensive in beautifully crafted books such as Mary Renault’s “The Charioteer”.

 

When you go and restrict things further by having a leading man who is slightly different? A couple of years back I released a short story, Tumble Turn, in which the love interest (Ben) is funny, a world class swimmer and very hot, even if he’s got mild Cerebral Palsy that tends to make the left side of his body go a bit odd at the most crucial of occasions. I guess he’s the most obvious example of a less than perfect hero I’ve written about, although Jonty and Orlando both bear the scars of their experiences in WWI, and of their formative years.

 

Lessons for Survivors is set in 1919, when peace has been in place for several months, but memories keep returning. I suspect nobody returned from the fighting unscathed in some way and my lads are no exception. Not least in that Jonty has a scar on his cheek and Orlando an even more dramatic one down his chest. They’re not bothered – in fact, being typical blokes, they seem to find these “medals of war” quite attractive. But it’s the mental scars which are probably hardest to overcome, both men having had painful memories from their youth – painful times they thought they’d come to terms with – resurfacing again.

 

So, if you read the Cambridge Fellows books, I promise you handsome, intelligent, daring and funny leading men, but they’re not perfect. They’re real. Or at least they’re real to me. 🙂

 

 

 

About Lessons for Survivors

 

A more than professional interest . . . a more than personal intrigue.

 

Orlando Coppersmith should be happy. WWI is almost a year in the past, he’s back at St. Bride’s College in Cambridge, his lover and best friend Jonty Stewart is at his side again, and—to top it all—he’s about to be made Forster Professor of Applied Mathematics. And although he and Jonty have precious little time for an investigative commission, they can’t resist a suspected murder case that must be solved in a month so a clergyman can claim his rightful inheritance.

But the courses of scholarship, true love, and amateur detecting never did run smooth. Orlando’s inaugural lecture proves almost impossible to write. A plagiarism case he’s adjudicating on turns nasty with a threat of blackmail against him and Jonty. And the murder investigation turns up too many leads and too little hard evidence.

Orlando and Jonty may be facing their first failure as amateur detectives, and the ruin of their professional and private reputations. Brains, brawn, the pleasures of the double bed—they’ll need them all to lay their problems to rest.

About Charlie Cochrane

 

As Charlie Cochrane couldn’t be trusted to do any of her jobs of choice—like managing a rugby team—she writes, with titles published by Carina, Samhain, Bold Strokes, MLR and Cheyenne.

Charlie’s Cambridge Fellows Series of Edwardian romantic mysteries was instrumental in her being named Author of the Year 2009 by the review site Speak Its Name. She’s a member of the Romantic Novelists’ Association, Mystery People, International Thriller Writers Inc and is on the organising team for UK Meet for readers/writers of GLBT fiction. She regularly appears with The Deadly Dames.

 

Connect with Charlie:

• Website:charliecochrane.co.uk/
• Blog: charliecochrane.livejournal.com/
• Twitter: @charliecochrane
• Facebook profile page: facebook.com/charlie.cochrane.18
• Goodreads: goodreads.com/goodreadscomcharlie_cochrane  

 

• Every comment on this blog tour enters you in a drawing for an e-book from Charlie Cochrane’s backlist (excepting Lessons For Survivors). Entries close at midnight, Eastern time, on January 31. Contest is NOT restricted to U.S. entries.