A warm welcome to author John Wiley joining us today her on Love Bytes to promote new release “Rooftops”.
Welcome John 🙂

Title: Rooftops
Author: John Wiley
Genre: Contemporary, Gay Romance, New Adult
Length: Novel
Publisher: Wayward ink Publishing

Synopsis

Its summer and three friends from Ohio graduate college, ready to start making their way in the real world.

Rhys; the eternal optimist who wants to be an actor and moves to Los Angeles.

Erick; the career man, seeking money and position who moves with him.

And Joey; the aspiring artist, who for the love of his girlfriend, Cheryl, stays behind in Ohio.

While attempting to follow their dreams each must face their share of personal and professional obstacles. Each is tested. Will they lose sight of themselves?

Will old friendships fall apart and new friendships form?

 

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Writing my book, I discovered that I had to be writing for me, not a potential audience. There was no guarantee that people would read it, but if I liked it, that’s all that really mattered. Of course, I want people to read my book and like it. With any luck it might become someone’s favorite book. I want to take this opportunity to share some of my favorite books.

The first book that I ever considered my favorite was Finders Keepers by Emily Rodda. I read it when I was in elementary school and haven’t reread it since, so most of the plot points have long been forgotten. The official summary from Amazon say:

“While playing a computer game, Patrick is transported to a parallel world and invited to participate in a game show in which he must find three lost items to win several fabulous prizes.”

I remember being drawn into the virtual world with Patrick, and not wanting to put the book down. I bought it years later because I enjoyed it so much, and should reread it.

It wasn’t until high school that I discovered my next favorite book. I worked at a library at the time and was shelf reading (making sure the books were in order) the New Fiction books and saw one that had a shiny red spine that stuck out to me. I pulled it from the shelf and read the summary for Talking to Addison by Jenny Colgan:

“The story opens with the modern-day heroine Holly trapped in the flat-share from hell with members of Scary Clean Freaks Incorporated, ruled by the obnoxious Carol who “dispensed … Robert de Niro-to-doomed gangster stares.” Even when Holly escapes the suburban inquisition, life still isn’t a bed of roses–she’s an unemployed florist, in love with a recluse, and being bullied. She’s in good company, though, when she moves in with a bunch of equally maladjusted misfits: Josh, a terminally nice boy, has issues; Kate, the high-flying, no-nonsense career girl, wilts every time a married man comes along; and then there’s Addison, the drop-dead-gorgeous lodger (“Johnny Depp in geek form”) who never leaves his room, already has a girlfriend (albeit over the Internet), and is a certified Star Trek fan.”

I love romantic comedies when it comes to movies, so I shouldn’t have been so surprised to enjoy the book genre so much. This was my first experience with “chick lit”, a genre I never read prior, despite being drawn to.

Talking To Addison was funny and sweet and while I’ve ‘only read it three times, it’ll very likely always remain my favorite book. It inspires the type of writing that I strive for – both funny but with heart – and opened a whole new genre to me. It also led me to one of my favorite series ever, Sophie Kinsella’s Shopaholic series.

It was a few years later when I saw a book review in Entertainment Weekly. The review was raving so I decided to give This Book Will Save Your Life by A.M. Homes a chance. The official summary reads:

“The journey from isolation to connection in a semiapocalyptic Los Angeles is the subject of this blithely redemptive new novel by Homes (Things You Should Know). Richard Novak is a day-trader wealthy enough to employ a housecleaner, nutritionist, decorator and personal trainer, but after he’s taken to the hospital with a panic attack he realizes he has no one to call. Determined to change his life, but also stalked by strange circumstances (e.g., a sinkhole opens in his lawn), Richard makes extravagant gestures of goodwill toward various acquaintances, relatives and strangers. By the time his misguided altruistic adventures have become fodder for late-night TV jokes, Ben, the son he abandoned years ago in a divorce, arrives in town. Richard’s tenuous and fraught reconnection with Ben is at the heart of his reclamation, but when it is complete the city of L.A. itself collapses, à la Mike Davis’s City of Quartz. Homes’s stale cultural critique feels deliberate. She gradually undoes the ordered precision of Richard’s Bobo paradise, and literally leaves him floating serenely on his kitchen tabletop in an “it’s all good” sort of daze. But the cool distance she keeps from Richard’s struggle, and the banal terms in which she articulates it, leave one with a much darker sense of the possibilities for being saved.”

The thing that I liked most about this book was how we just kind of followed Richard around as he sorts out his life. It’s not a grand adventure and it doesn’t even necessarily feel important, it’s just one man’s life. But holding the mirror of his life up to your own life leaves you in a good place once you close the book.

The newest addition to my list of favorite books was discovered only a couple of years ago. Dash and Lily’s Book of Dares by David Levithan and Rachel Cohen is a book that just stays with you once you finish it. The summary reads:

“Levithan writes the chapters narrated by Dash, a “bookish” 16-year-old spending Christmas break alone. He finds a red moleskin notebook amid the shelves of the Strand bookstore. “Are you going to be playing for the pure thrill of unreluctant desire?” asks Cohn’s Lily in the first coded message of the notebook, with an invitation to respond. Lily is aglow with the yuletide and devastated that her parents are spending the holidays in Fiji. Armed with anonymity, Dash and Lily exchange the notebook in various locations around the Big Apple, filling it with their greatest hopes and deepest fears, and ultimately find themselves falling in love. Not surprisingly, the young pair’s perceptions of each other don’t entirely reflect reality; Dash’s ex asks if he is in love with the girl writing in the book or the girl he is picturing in his head. The spirit of the season amplifies Dash and Lily’s loneliness and heightens the connection between them, in another surefire hit from the creators of Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist (2006).”

One thing about this book is that it quadrupled my reading list, because it left me wanting to read every book mentioned in it, from Big Fat Hoochie Prom Queen to Vile Bodies. It’s a love story without being sappy. It’s incredibly quotable and opened the YA section up to me in a way that it wasn’t before.

So basically, once you’ve finished Rooftops, read any of those books and you won’t be disappointed.

 

ERICK CLIMBS into the truck and shuts the door. “So you don’t like them then?”

“I can’t help it!” yells Rhys. “It’s chemical or something. Gays and lesbians just don’t get along. It’s like… vampires and sunlight… cats and dogs… penises and vaginas. They just don’t fit!”

“Um, actually you’ll find they do fit together quite—”

“Okay. Eww, enough. I saw that porn about the girl with all the moles in Paris you eye-raped me into watching.” He buckles his seatbelt. “I still have nightmares.”

They drive down the road in silence. A few minutes later Rhys sighs.

“What?” asks Erick.

“How are we going to get home?”

“Your car,” says Erick.

“You mean the one that vanished at the casino?”

“So we’re talking about it now?”

“No!” Rhys leans his head back. “We aren’t off to a good start. But at least we had some adventures on the drive out.”

“I know.” Erick turns into the Mover and Groover parking lot. “But let’s just get this dropped off so we don’t have to pay for it.”

They get out of the truck and walk to the door to the office. Erick tugs on it, but it’s locked. “Dammit! We’re gonna have to pay an extra day now.”

“Maybe not,” says Rhys, pointing at the sign on the door. “It looks like they’ve gone out of business.”

“Do places really go out of business within three days and have no idea it’s going to happen?” Erick turns to Rhys, who is standing over by the truck, on his phone, nodding.

Rhys hangs up. “I just called the office and the company really has shut down. We can keep the truck! It’s really convenient actually, like in a TV show.”

“Sweet! That means if we run out of money and can’t afford rent we can live in the back of the truck. It’ll be like The Boxcar Children… only in a moving truck… and we’re not children. We can be the Moving Truck Men!”

Rhys shrugs. “Or we can drive home now instead of hitchhiking.”

“That too.” Erick climbs in. “Let’s rock and roll.”

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JOHN WILEY is currently a barista that hates coffee, but is really good at making it. When not writing, he likes to expose his cat to as many Christmas movies as possible. Just like his life, his biography is a work in progress.

Website: https://heckyesitsjohn.wordpress.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/HeckYesItsJohn
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