A warm Love Bytes welcome to author Tia Fielding joining us today to talk about new release “Ten”.
Welcome Tia 🙂

As I write this, it’s early January in Finland. In my part of the country, there’s SO MUCH SNOW already. The weather has been pretty regular winter weather, for example tomorrow should be around 23F, although probably a bit colder than that. Two days ago, late evening when I had to take my dogs out, it was -13F. That’s getting to Really Really Cold for even a person who is used to this stuff.

Why am I talking about the weather? Well, when the story that would become Ten was starting to form in my mind, I didn’t have a location for it. I wanted it to be remote, but also with weathers that felt even a bit familiar to me. Seasons, if you will, because that’s what we have here.

I went through a mental list of settings I’d used before, and while there has been snow in my stories before, I needed a new place. Luckily I have a good friend who lives in Wisconsin, and she told me about a place she’d gone on vacations sometimes. I won’t name the town, but it’s small, and I basically modeled my imaginary town of Acker based on what I could find out online.

Of course, Acker is completely imaginary. It’s a mix of the town my friend went to, places I’ve seen in TV series, heck, even somewhat similar to my own home town.

Why did I come up with a new town and plop it on the map instead of using one that was already there? Well first of all, I knew there were more stories that needed to be told in the same town. I wanted to go deep with it, to make sure I knew exactly what was where, what happened there now and in the past, so that I could make a future for the townspeople there. The plus side was that there’d be nobody who could read the story and point out something that just didn’t fit or didn’t exist, or could never exist in a town they knew.

In some ways, writing Acker that was in the middle of nowhere Wisconsin was exactly the opposite of writing my Finnshifters series years ago. That series was set in Finland, and I even modeled their closest town based on my own home town. Hell, one of the characters goes to an establishment I used to work at (you can probably figure out what the place was if you’d read the books and know me at all.)

Knowing I wanted to do justice to my town made me realize that I couldn’t do that with another small town (Acker is much, much smaller than my small city, by the way) that I didn’t know personally.

See, it’s all about the scale. I’ve set stories in places like LA, London, Atlanta, and others. When it’s a place that big, there’s room to maneuver around—no pun intended. There’s room for error in ways that there just aren’t in tiny towns.

And that’s why I came up with Acker. I could plot down a sheriff’s station where I wanted it to be. Give the town a grocery store with a crochety old man and his nice wife—or is it the opposite way around after all, I wonder—next to the clinic that used to double as human and animal clinic (although different sides of the building and with different doctors.)

The freedom of placing things where I needed them to be, making the town the scale I wanted it to be, and leaving the surroundings vague for growth—again, I knew there would be other books to come—freed my creativity in ways I didn’t expect.

So when you read Ten, I hope you enjoy the location it’s set in. I hope you feel that the people in town are real, could be your neighbors, especially if you come from a small place yourself.

After all, the places we grow up in leave their marks on us on so many levels. And sometimes home is where you least think you’ll find it.

Blurb:

Can two broken men build one life?

Ten years.

That’s what Makai lost for a crime he didn’t commit. He’s been exonerated, but the abuse he suffered in prison isn’t so easy to leave behind. He heads to the one place he remembers being happy: Acker, Wisconsin, where he spent summers with his grandpa. Unfortunately, not everyone wants Makai there.

Ten days.

That’s how long Emil, now twenty-one, was held prisoner as a teenager. The mental and physical injuries he suffered at the hands of a drug trafficking ring still haunt him.

Nightmares, anxiety, and PTSD challenge the connection forming between Makai and Emil, though together, they might find a way to move beyond their pain and into a future—and a relationship—that both had thought impossible.

Now they just have to convince Emil’s father, the town sheriff. It won’t be easy with danger closer than they know….

Buy link

Dreamspinner Press

Amazon

Tia Fielding is a Finnish LGBTQ+ romance author. She lives in a small middle-of-nowhere town surrounded by nature and silence, just like she prefers. Tia identifies as genderqueer, but isn’t fussy about pronouns, because her native language doesn’t have gender-specific ones. She’s a lover of caffeine, sarcasm, peppermint, cats and dogs, sleeping and witty people.

Social Media:

Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/authortiafielding/

Patreon – https://www.patreon.com/tiafielding

Twitter – https://twitter.com/tiafielding