With All the Way Out, I wanted to play with tropes. I allowed myself to lean into a lot of familiar romance tropes like the one-night stand, turned true love, the jock and music student, coming out, loss of virginity, being forced to work together, etc etc. It felt totally self-absorbent, but also totally rewarding. Tropes are tropes for a reason, right? Because they feel good. We know what to expect as a reader and enjoy the anticipation of the projected outcome.
With my next project, currently titled Wow and Flutter, I aimed for something different. There were several things I wanted to try because I hadn’t explored them in my previous writing. I saw writing book #2 as a test for myself:
- I wanted to write solely from one character’s POV. Third person limited omniscient. Only in the lead character’s head. For most of the longer form works I’ve written, I’ve always jumped between characters (never in one chapter though!). All the Way Out is the perfect example of that – sometimes we’re with Liam, sometimes we’re with Zach. Though ATWO really is Zach’s story, Liam feels just as much a lead character to me. But with W&F, I stuck in our main character Alex’s head the whole time. Very different!
- My natural writing state is present tense. I think it flows from me better as I imagine what is happening in a scene. I describe it as if I were watching it. Thus, the present tense. My first Revise and Resubmit for All the Way Out was an ask from my current editor/publisher to make it past tense. A real labor of love but 100% worth it! So I wrote Wow and Flutter in past tense right away.
- Lastly, I wanted to play with some nostalgia. I’m an Xenial – born in a micro-generation between Gen X and the Millenials. I wanted to write a new adult novel that played with the era when I was a new adult – in my late teens and early twenties. Wow and Flutter starts in 1998. Alex has a beeper and when he gets a phone call from his crush Jesse, his mom answers because they only have a house phone.
Wow & Flutter was born from a single line of dialogue: “I had every intention of falling in love with you.”
The story revolves around that idea of truly deep love that feels like kismet but happens at the wrong time, a time so wrong you might not even be old enough to realize it for what it is.
To me, that young life during college and just after, is filled with those near misses. Those people that if you’d only met them a few years later or a few years earlier, things could be very different.
But luckily for the two characters Alex and Jesse, they get that second chance – with a few swerves along the way.
Jesse Parker is front man of the band The Key Frames and Alex has been obsessed with their music for years – just don’t ever call him a groupie. His infatuation started when he was 16, only recently out to his parents and best friend, was only compounded when he first saw Jesse perform at a house party, then pull another handsome house guest upstairs to have his way with him.
Several years, a fake ID to get him into 18 and over shows and one awkward conversation later, Jesse’s gaydar pings and he invites Alex back to his place in Inwood for an epic ending to Alex’s 18th’s birthday. Jesse is funny and tender, and their night together turns into a day at the beach together, which then leads to a relationship just as Alex starts college at The Julliard School for music performance.
But when the Frames are signed by Epic Records, a big record company in LA, their nascent relationship is over before it ever had the chance to really start.
Five years later though, Alex finds himself in LA, too working for a rival record label. When Jesse’s name is dropped at a meeting, a wellspring of memory—as well as the realization that he and Jesse are in the same city again—brings back Alex’s old fondness. He reaches out to Jesse who is only elated that Alex has gotten in touch after nearly five years.
But what happens when Alex’s boss finds out about his connection to Jesse Parker? What lengths will Alex go? And will it be for the sake of his own career or the sake of love?
If you liked All the Way Out, I really hope you get the chance to read Wow and Flutter one day, too!
Book Title: All the Way Out
Author: Ingrid Sterling
Publisher: Literary Wanderlust
Release Date: April 1, 2021
Genre/s: Contemporary M/M Romance, New Adult
Trope/s: One-night stand turned into true love; Forced proximity; Athlete with musician; closeted sports star
Themes: Self-acceptance, coming out publicly
Heat Rating: 4 flames
Length: 79 000/263 pages
It is a standalone book.
Buy Links – Available in Kindle Unlimited
Literary Wanderlust | Bookshop.org
Blurb
Ever since Zach was 14 years old, he knew two things about himself:
1) He wanted to play football at the highest levels of college and pro ball.
2) He was gay.
Even at that young age Zach knew that those two truths – all-star athlete and homosexual male – could not exist concurrently. So, he’d started dating Rebecca, his devoutly Catholic girlfriend who wants to wait to have sex until she’s married, during his junior year of high school and never looked back.
But on the last night of a team trip to Rome, on the cusp of his senior season at Northwestern University, a Heisman, a number 1 draft pick and a National Championship, Zach seeks out one last anonymous encounter. He opens Grindr and slips out into the Italian summer night to meet Liam – Liam who has a face that looks like it was carved from Carrara marble by one of the ancient greats and whose brazen facade becomes sheepish when he’s asked about his past in Paris. The night is intense, better than Zach could have imagined. But like all one-night stands, it comes to an end by morning’s light.
But what happens to Zach’s carefully manicured plans for a professional football career and a life in the closet when Liam shows up, not only on the Northwestern campus the first day of the fall semester, but in Zach’s upper-level Plato seminar, too?
“What are you doing in my upper level classics seminar?” Liam snapped.
“Um, I’m fulfilling my degree requirements,” Zach snapped back. “What are you doing in my upper level classics seminar? You live in Rome.”
“No, I was regrouping in Rome. I’d been going to school in Paris before that but—Wait, degree requirements? You’re a Classics major? Mr. Hotshot-starting-quarterback is a Classics major?” Liam’s voice came out shriller than he would have liked.
Zach set his hips back against the table, crossing his arms with a sudden smugness. “A Classics major focusing in Pax Romana philosophers with a 3.7 GPA, you mean? Yeah. I am. How do you think I recognized that ridiculous Metamorphoses quote on your Grindr profile?”
“I figured you Googled it like everyone else usually did.”
Zach’s face softened at Liam’s unintentional reveal. “Why didn’t you say anything about coming to school in the States that night?” Zach asked.
Liam leveled him with a look. “I don’t remember us doing an awful lot of talking.”
“We talked enough. You could have mentioned it.”
“I’d only decided to come here a week or so before we met,” Liam explained. “I barely knew anything about Northwestern aside from the fact that it has a pretty well-respected music program. Certainly not enough to know it has some big deal football team. And besides, what were the chances?”
“I’m not a betting man, but I definitely wouldn’t have taken these odds.” Doe-eyed panic lingered on Zach’s face even as he shifted to a more conversational tone. “So, the music school, huh? That’s cool. I remember you had music on your desk. What do you play?”
“Piano mostly, but I’m a composition major. I added a Classics minor ‘cause I can, here. My other school didn’t offer liberal arts courses.” Zach nodded, and Liam realized it was probably his turn to attempt conversation. “A jock with a brain, then. Color me impressed.”
Zach gave a bored lift of his shoulder. “It makes for a great human-interest story. I think every bad pun about Greek gods or Roman gladiators has been made about me at least once. The ESPN announcers think they are so fucking clever.”
Liam stared at him. “You keep saying these things thinking I know what they mean.”
“ESPN.” Zach gave him a patient grin. “It’s a cable sports network that shows games. You know, on the TV.”
“Yeah, alright.” Liam’s pursed lips morphed into an unbidden smile.
It was impossible not to note how the tension in the room had slipped away. The looks that passed between them carried a certain playfulness once they were forced to accept the inconceivable fact that they were both here in the same city, at the same school, and even in the same class. And into that ease slipped the feelings of attraction and memories of the intimacy they’d found on Liam’s mattress by the end of their night together. Liam had sought hidden parts of Zach’s body with his fingers. That small, insinuating touch, burned into his memory, had ignited such terrified want in Zach’s bright blue eyes that Liam had known that he would have been allowed to feel Zach from the inside if only they’d had more time. One more night. One more hour, even. And now here Zach was, standing before him. It was as baffling as it was thrilling. Liam certainly wouldn’t mind if they wound up hooking up again.
“Look,” Zach started, “This is crazy that you’re here, and I hope you love your time at Northwestern as much as I have, but it’s probably for the best if we don’t interact.”
Liam was rendered mute.
“I mean, I know we’re in class together,” Zach continued. “We’ll have to interact, discussion grades and everything, but what I mean is, we shouldn’t be friendly.”
“Why not?” Liam asked after another stunned beat.
“It’s nothing personal. In fact, I think you’re—” Zach stopped. He pressed his eyes closed and shook his head sadly. He took another steadying breath before speaking again. “It would make things really difficult for me. Like I told you in Rome, no one knows about me. About me and…” He spoke the next word at a careful volume. “Men. In fact, you’re the only person on this entire campus who does.”
Zach’s sexuality was a secret that should have bound them. But instead, Zach was using it to put a wedge between them, between even the possibility of them. Liam didn’t think the conversation could get any more ridiculous.
I named myself “Ingrid” after a character in a story I started writing and will never finish.
I named myself “Sterling” after my dad’s boyhood dreams.
I’m a Yankee who has lived south of the Mason Dixon for a decade and I use ‘Y’all’ without irony. I dance in my kitchen. I vote. I love all the cats in the world and a good IPA. I will scream over college sports.
I write about love, with love, because #loveislove.
With two degrees in music performance, I strive to make my words sing. The rhythm and pacing of the prose are as important to me as my complicated, imperfect characters and my guaranteed happily-ever-afters.
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