A warm welcome to author Sarah Madison joining us today on her creative minds blog tour for the re release of “The Boys of Summer”.
Welcome Sarah 🙂

 

TITLE: The Boys of Summer

AUTHOR: Sarah Madison

PUBLISHER: Dreamspinner Press

COVER ARTIST: Reese Dante

LENGTH: 200 Pages

RELEASE DATE: December 21, 2015

BLURB: 2nd Edition

David McIntyre has been enjoying the heck out of his current assignment: touring the Hawaiian Islands in search of the ideal shooting locations for a series of film-company projects. What’s not to like? Stunning scenery, great food, sunny beaches… and Rick Sutton, the hot, ex-Air Force pilot who is flying him around.

Everything changes when a tropical storm and engine failure force a crash landing on a deserted atoll with a WWII listening post. Rick’s injuries and a lack of food and water mean David has to step up to the plate and play hero. While his days are spent fighting for survival, and his nights are filled with worrying about Rick, the two men grow closer. David’s research for his next movie becomes intertwined with his worst fears, and events on the island result in a vivid dream about the Battle of Britain. On waking, David realizes Rick is more than just a pilot to him. The obstacles that prevented a happy ending in 1940 aren’t present today, and David vows that if they survive this stranding, he will tell Rick how he feels.

Today we have Sarah Madison visiting and we had the priviledge of asking her a few questions.

First can you tell us a bit about the story?

I’m embarrassed to say I just wanted to write a fun little stranded-on-a-deserted-island story—something like the movie Six Days Seven Nights—and that’s all it was intended to be. Somewhere along the line, however, I got fixated on this mental image of my hero, Rick Sutton, dressed as a RAF fighter pilot, leaning against the side of a Spitfire. Well, that didn’t fit into the story at all, but I couldn’t shake it, so I decided to make it part of a dream sequence. One, maybe two paragraphs and that would be it. The fixation would be satisfied, and I could go back to figuring out how to get my boys off the island while still making them fall in love. I even contemplated introducing drug smugglers as the inciting threat to send them into each other’s arms! Only when I began researching the details, I was appalled to discover that I knew so little about such an important, critical time in history, or how much those young fighter pilots sacrificed to protect their countries. The more I read the more I had to know. I haunted the library; heck, I practically bought out the historical section at Barnes and Noble (one of the best was Fighter Boys by Patrick Bishop). I watched movies. I had friends go to museums for me. A month later, I resurfaced knowing I couldn’t let this image be just a throwaway scene in a lightweight romance. I had to tell their stories too.

All in all, the expanded historical section served me far better than a band of drug dealers.

 

Why did you decide to do a re-release?

That’s an excellent question. The Boys of Summer was my very first attempt at self-publishing, and I made a lot of newbie errors. I had the good sense to pay for an outstanding cover—that was about the only thing I did right. I didn’t pay for professional editing, nor did I pay someone else to format it for me. Initially, I uploaded the wrong file, a much older one, to Smashwords as well, and didn’t even realize my horrendous mistake until someone contacted me about the errors. Even after correcting that mistake, I kept finding other things I’d done wrong. I was very much disheartened by my screw-ups. The Boys of Summer is probably one of the best things I’ve ever written, and I felt as though I’d sunk it in the harbor before it even had a chance to get the sails up.

Even with all the corrections, I thought the story needed the hand of a professional editor. When Dreamspinner agreed to take it on, I was thrilled. The team at Dreamspinner was exactly the set of expert hands I wanted at the helm for a re-launch.

Is there anything you wouldn’t want to write about? Or for that matter you would like to write about that you didn’t yet?

I confess, I’m not particularly interested in high school or college age protagonists. For me, those years were spent nose-to-the-grindstone in studies, making it hard to find anything exciting or memorable to turn into stories. Not to mention, I feel most people don’t really start to get interesting until they’ve been on the planet a bit longer. By the time you’ve hit your thirties, you’ve lived long enough and made enough mistakes for your backstory to be fun—at least to a storyteller that is!

I’ve tackled a wide variety of subjects in my stories, and I don’t shy away from much, but I haven’t traveled a lot, and so I tend not to spin stories set in exotic locations if I can help it. You can only glean so much from Google Maps after all! So much of the specifics of a geographical location are tied up in scent, sound, the feel of the earth beneath your feet, the quality of the light streaming down from the sky. These are hard things to convey if you haven’t experienced them firsthand. I’d love to travel more solely for this reason alone!

As someone who’s led an insular life, I’m not particularly comfortable writing about cultures differing wildly from my own—for similar reasons. And zombies scare the piss out of me, so you’re not likely to ever get a zombie story from me. Okay, that was a joke, but the reality of it is I think we’ve got far too much dystopian fic out there now as it is. We need stories with more hope to them, in my humble opinion, that is!

Do you have any New Year resolutions?

I tend not to make New Year’s resolutions because they just seem to be a way of setting myself up for failure. I’m bad for biting off more than I can chew, for having eyes bigger than my stomach, for making grandiose plans I can’t commit to, or promising too many people I’d take on too many projects. It’s becoming clear to me that not only do I need to learn to tell people no, but I can no longer rely on good genes and relative good health to coast along. I’ve got to implement a plan of living that is not about resolutions or short-term goals such as weight loss, but are about the rest of my life. This means revamping my diet and including more exercise than just walking the dogs. I’ve been fortunate to be healthy and a decent weight most of my life, but it’s getting harder to maintain the status quo just by getting up in the morning.

What is your Favorite way to spend a day off?

I love having the option of sleeping an extra half hour (the animals never let me sleep in longer than that!) and then taking the dogs for a long hike in the woods. I usually bring my camera with me to take pictures, too. If the weather is nice, I like to spend a couple of hours at the barn riding my horse. Then, with tuckered dogs snoring on the couch, I open the WIP and sit down to write. If I could live every day like this, it would be heaven.

What are you plans for the future?

I’ve got a couple (maybe too many) of irons in the fire right now. I’m currently working on a M/F story set in the 1950s, featuring a secret agency that investigates paranormal events. I think of it as “Ward and June Cleaver meets the X-Files.” It’s slow going because this is all new territory for me, and it’s important to me to get her right.

I’m halfway through a rough draft of a M/M Regency story, and am working on a contemporary M/M set in the sport horse world of eventing. I’m plotting out a short story for a vampire anthology, and I have this burning desire to write a Regency featuring a reluctant ghost hunter. I have a ridiculously tropey holiday story I hope to get out by next Christmas, and of course, I must write the next installment of the Sixth Sense series! Did I mention I have planned sequels for Crying for the Moon as well? Gah! That’s me all over. Too many great ideas and not enough time to write them. The priority this year has to be the follow-up to Truth and Consequences (Sixth Sense Book 3). People are (gently) threatening me if I don’t give them closure! J

Outside of writing, I plan to attend Animazement in May, and I’m waiting feverishly for registration to open for this year’s Writer’s Police Academy. I’d love to go to more conventions, but I only get so much vacation time per year, and I’m forced to pick and choose. More than anything, I’d like to travel with my boyfriend this summer, and if it comes down to a convention or seeing more of the world, well, I can always write a story about the places I’ve seen!

 

“I don’t think we’ve got much choice.” Sutton’s voice was grim. “We’re lucky to have that much. Hold on, these trees are coming up faster than I’d like.”

Still fighting to keep the nose of the plane up, Sutton guided the recalcitrant aircraft toward the so-called clearing, the ground rising up to meet them far faster than was comfortable. David found himself leaning back in his seat, bracing his hands on the console as the tops of trees scraped the underside of the plane. Branches swiped at the windshield, and David had the sudden impression of being in a car wash scene as written by Stephen King.

“Duck your head!” Sutton barked. “Wrap your arms around your legs!”

“And kiss my ass goodbye?” David shouted, raising his voice over the increasing noise as he obeyed Sutton’s orders.

Incredibly, Sutton laughed. It was an oddly comforting sound. Like everything was somehow going to be all right because Sutton was at the controls.

The moment of humor was gone in a flash. The plane screamed with the sound of tearing metal and the sharp, explosive crack of tree limbs and breaking glass. David kept his head down and his eyes closed, praying to a God he was pretty sure had more important things to do than to keep up with the well-being of one David McIntyre. Despite being strapped in his seat, his head and shoulder thumped painfully against the passenger side door as the plane thrashed wildly. There was a moment of eerie, blessed silence, and for an instant, the assault on the plane seemed as though it had lifted. Eye of the storm, David thought, just before the plane hit the ground.

Someone had left the window open and it was raining on him. How incredibly annoying. He shifted, intent on reaching for the offending window, when a jolt of pain ran through his shoulder and he gasped. When he opened his eyes, nothing made any sense at first. Then he remembered the crash, and realized that his side of the plane was pointing up at the sky. The rain was coming down in a steady stream through the broken windshield. The sound of the rain on the metal hull of the plane was nearly deafening.

He winced at the pain in his neck when he turned to look over at the pilot’s seat. Sutton was slumped to one side in his chair, unmoving. His sunglasses were hanging off one ear.

“Oh God, oh God, oh God,” David murmured, hastily undoing his seatbelt so he could reach across to Sutton. His skin was cold and damp where David touched it, and adrenaline pounded through David’s veins as though he could jumpstart Sutton’s heart by sending his own pulse beating through his fingertips. “Sutton! Rick!”

David fought to free himself of his seat, twisting for greater access to the other side of the cockpit. When the seatbelt came open, he fell half across Sutton. Sprawled practically in his lap, David could now see the nasty cut on the left side of Sutton’s temple. The pilot’s side of the plane had taken a lot of damage, and David yelped as he encountered a sliver of glass. Bits of the windshield and console were scattered like confetti over Sutton’s jacket. “Sutton!” The lack of response was unnerving. He tossed aside the sunglasses and worked a hand down into Sutton’s collar, feeling frantically for a pulse.

He could have kissed the man when Sutton suddenly groaned.

Dreamspinner Press (eBook)

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Sarah Madison is a veterinarian with a large dog, an even bigger horse, too many cats, and a very patient boyfriend. An amateur photographer and a former competitor in the horse sport known as eventing, when she’s not out hiking with the dog or down at the stables, she’s at the laptop working on her next story. When she’s in the middle of a chapter, she relies on the smoke detector to tell her dinner is ready. She writes because it’s cheaper than therapy.

Sarah Madison was a finalist in the 2013 Rainbow Awards and is the winner of Best M/M Romance in the 2013 PRG Reviewer’s Choice Awards.

If you want to make her day, e-mail her and tell you how much you like her stories.

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