Win a free copy of The Russian Boy

I'm giving away a free copy of my M/M romance, The Russian Boy, in the Sizzling Summer Reads contest at The Romance Reads.



A famous, erotically charged painting called The Russian Boy depicts a nude Russian noble named Alexei Dubernin, younger lover of painter Fyodor Luschenko. Their affair takes place in the elegance of a lost world, the Russian enclave on the Cote d’Azur in the years just before the revolution of 1917.

The painting, owned by the New York Museum of Fine Arts, is stolen from a restorer’s studio in Paris, bringing together three very different men, each of whom must risk his life to return this precious work of art and earn the love he deserves.

Fifty-year-old Rowan McNair was a college art history professor until he lost his marriage, his family and his job after an affair with a young male former student. Now he struggles to make a new life in New York as a journalist and art theft consultant.

Taylor Griffin is finishing his first year on a painting fellowship at the Institute des Artistes in Montmartre, sharing a tiny studio apartment with his Russian émigré boyfriend, Dmitri Baranov, a fellow student. When Dmitri steals The Russian Boy, he plunges himself, Taylor, and eventually Rowan into a dangerous world of drugs, sex and intrigue.

The Russian Boy is a sexy, romantic story about older men involved with younger men, about art and love and the risks we take when we fall in love.



Sizzling Summer Reads contest at The Romance Reviews

Sneak Peek Sunday - Olives for the Stranger

As demonstrators and police spar in the streets of Tunis, bodyguards Aidan and Liam must protect Leila, a young girl whose mother has been taken into police custody. While the threats against her and her activist parents grow, hunky ex-SEAL Liam is stuck in the Tunisian countryside while teacher and novice bodyguard Aidan travels to France on his own with Leila.

Liam must deal with his emotions once separated from his partner, while Aidan struggles to protect Leila and her father from a deadly villian as Liam has taught him. Both men must examine the depths of their love for each other and satisfy themselves that more than just sexual desire keeps them together.

Here are the first six paragraphs of Olives for the Stranger, fourth in my Have Body, Will Guard series:

There were two of them, and they came at Liam McCullough fast and low, both of them screaming as they did.

The one on the right went for his leg, while the other tried to climb up his chair and get to his head.

“Children! Please!” their mother called. “Leave the nice bodyguard alone.” Her English was heavily accented, and she switched into her native Brazilian Portuguese, following with a string of speech that did nothing to pull the boy or the girl off him.

He smiled grimly and grabbed them both under his arms and stood up. The little girl kicked at the back of a gilt chair, which fell to the plush carpet with a thud. “Why don’t I take the kids outside so they can run around?”

The middle-aged saleswoman who had been showing Zoraida Figueroa hand-embroidered shawls looked relieved. She had been twisting the pearls around her neck with long, elegant fingers as the children rampaged through the narrow store.

Liam and Aidan, his partner in love and business, had been watching Zoraida and her two children for three days by then, while her husband concluded a deal to sell Brazilian rubber to the Tunisian government. Zoraida, twenty-eight, had bonded immediately with Aidan, the two of them chattering away and shopping like best girlfriends.

http://www.loose-id.com/authors/l-p/neil-plakcy/have-body-will-guard-4-olives-for-the-stranger.html

Is Height Sexy?

I admit to finding height sexy in a man. At my tallest (I seem to be shrinking a bit with old age) I was six-foot and a half-inch. Of course, I represented myself as six-one, and I found myself attracted to men who were taller than I was. My first serious boyfriend was six-four, and so is my partner. I like that feeling of being with someone bigger than I am.

That has carried over to my characters. Kimo Kanapa’aka, the police detective hero of my Mahu Investigations series, is six-one, and his partner, fire investigator Mike Riccardi, is six-four. I think Kimo feels that being with Mike gives him a bit of personal protection, and relief from always being the one to protect others.

The same is true in the Have Body, Will Guard series. Aidan Greene is six-one, and his partner, ex-SEAL Liam McCullough, is six-four. Seeing a pattern here?

I began to question whether it’s just height that I find sexy after seeing The Hobbit. There were some seriously sexy dwarves in that movie. Kili hits the top spot on my hotness scale, followed in close order by Fili, Thorin Oakenshield, and Bombur (because he has a great smile, even though he wears a goofy hat.)

But those guys are dwarves – not tall at all. How could I find that sexy? Well, the filmmakers were pretty shrewd, aided by Tolkien’s original book. In The Lord of the Rings, Gimli the dwarf shares screen time with men, elves and all kinds of other creatures, so it’s pretty clear that he’s short. But in The Hobbit, most of the time the dwarves are alone with Bilbo and Gandalf, so it’s easy to forget that, with the exception of the wizard, they’re height-challenged.

I digress to say that I’ve had a soft spot for Kili and Fili since I read Dove by Robin Lee Graham as an impressionable teenager. In this round-the-world adventure, Graham adopts two kittens, which he names after these two dwarves. I don’t remember if he had a reason—but I glommed onto those two in particular.

I think the filmmakers were sharp in giving us some man candy on the screen. We never get to see Kili or Fili shirtless, or even skinny-dipping in some mountain glade (are you listening, Peter Jackson? There’s another movie we’re looking forward to. I’m picturing Kili and Fili romping under one of those New Zealand waterfalls, sporting some Maori-style tattoos and nothing else.) But even fully clothed, these four guys bring a real hotness factor to the movie.

Checking the Internet Movie Database, I discovered that Aidan Turner, the Irish actor who plays Kili, is actually six feet tall. British actor Richard Armitrage, who plays Thorin, is six-two. So maybe I’m not far off in my desires. And as long as they never get filmed directly next to some tall elf, I’ll continue to think they’re hella sexy dwarves!

My Girlfriend Who Lives in Canada

One of the very clever bits from the Broadway show Avenue Q is a song called “My Girlfriend who Lives in Canada.” The Urban Dictionary defines this term as “a lie invented by hundreds if not thousands of geeky high school boys who can't get any dates and don't want to appear pathetic.”

In Avenue Q, the closeted character Rod pretends to have a girlfriend in Canada to cover up his homosexuality. When I heard about the fact that Notre Dame football player Manti Te’o had an imaginary girlfriend, I immediately thought of this song.

Maybe things have changed in college since I was a student—but way back then, it was pretty easy for football players to score live, human girlfriends. Yeah, a few had hometown honeys, but mostly they could just swagger into any classroom, dorm or campus hangout and girls would flock around.

So what caused this guy to settle for some phone calls, emails and text messages? Did whoever perpetrated the hoax do such a great job that Te’o was willing to forego F2F contact? Or maybe this girlfriend who lived (and died) in California was the same kind of cover Rod in Avenue Q was looking for?

Reading and Listening

One of the pieces of advice I often give my writing students is to read what they’ve written out loud. It helps them catch errors such as missing words or improper punctuation—things you just don’t see when you read off the screen or a piece of paper. If you can’t read a sentence out loud clearly, I tell them, then there’s probably something wrong with the punctuation.

I experienced this myself, in a slightly different sense, as I listened to the individual chapters of In Dog We Trust as they were being recorded for an audio book version.

I put a lot of work into that book, the first in my golden retriever series. It was my first attempt at writing an amateur sleuth, after years of using police procedures to structure the Mahu Investigations. I rewrote the beginning a half-dozen times as I struggled to figure out where the story really started, and how to work in the character’s back story.

Steve Levitan is forty-two, returning to his hometown in scenic, semi-rural Bucks County, Pennsylvania with his tail figuratively between his legs. His wife suffered two miscarriages, which led to their divorce and his brief incarceration for computer hacking. Released on parole, he’s lost his marriage, his home, his career, and the freedom to do whatever he wants.

The architect of Steve’s restoration is a golden retriever owned by his next-door neighbor, Caroline Kelly. The story requires Steve to meet and dislike Rochester, and then for Caroline to be murdered. The book’s opening was bumpy, jumping through nearly a year in the space of a chapter or two. It took a lot of rewriting to make the timetable work well.

Then there was the problem of Steve’s character. I based him too closely on myself, and frankly, he came off like a fuddy-duddy. He drank tea and spent too much time comparing his situation to characters in books. It took the advice of a savvy editor, the estimable Joe Pittman, to make Steve a character readers could have some fun with.

So I thought that by the time I self-published the book in e-book and paperback format, it was in great shape. Early reviews, and strong sales, justified that opinion, and I went on to write three more books in the series—The Kingdom of Dog (2011), Dog Helps Those (2012), and Friar Lake, which should be polished and published in 2013.

During the fall, I listened to the individual MP3 files uploaded by the book’s narrator. I’ve never been much of a fan of audio books. I know many people who enjoy them, but I don’t work out (I know I should) and my commute is too short to get into anything longer than a short story, though I love the Selected Shorts put out by Symphony Space.

I needed something else to do while I was listening, so I played computer mahjongg as Kelly read his way through the chapters. It took me a few chapters to get into the book, but now I understand why people like this format, and I also gained a new appreciation for my own work. It was almost like I was listening to a book I hadn't written!

Buy the audio book at Amazon

Kringle -- not Kris, but the pastry

Kringle Blog I love to cook and bake, to read about food, and to write about it. I’m always interested in how other authors use food in their books, and often discover delicacies I want to try. That was the case with “Kringle, the single greatest pastry the world has ever created,” which I discovered through Mark Zubro’s Another Dead Republican.

Since Christmas is approaching, I was thinking about Kringle again. The first time I heard about Kringle, it was being eaten by Tom and Scott, Zubro’s heroes. “Scott handed out napkins and small slices of Kringle to Enid and me and took one for himself. It was pecan, the best kind. I swallowed it in two bites. Mom had remembered to pick up the Kringle from Racine. Count on mom to get the best pastry ever invented at a time like this.”

I was intrigued, but when I read, “As we talked I offered more Kringle around. Enid declined. Scott and I took more. You had to scarf down Kringle when you got the chance. You never knew when you might be facing your last chance at Kringle,” I thought this was a pastry I had to find out more about.

Fortunately, Cook’s Country just came out with a simplified recipe for Kringle, which in its complicated form required three days of preparation, including folding the dough over and over again. I’ve done that when making pain au chocolate, chocolate croissants, and it’s very tedious.

http://www.cookscountry.com/recipes/Pecan-Kringle/21165?Extcode=L2MN5AA00

I admit that several of my problems with this recipe came from not following the instructions. I started out using the blender instead of the food processor. Not a disaster, but it did make something else to clean up. Then I dumped all the ingredients for the dough into the processor—not realizing I was supposed to wait to add the sour cream until after the dough had become pebbly. Oops. And I put the egg I was supposed to use for a wash over the dough into the dough. Second oops.

The Kringle turned out pretty well, though. It’s not as flaky as it could have been, but it tastes good. Maybe I’ll figure out a way to get Kringle into one of my own books!

Have we already had a gay president?

A gay man has been in the White House. And not as a visitor—as president!

The news is explosive, particularly for the man who makes this revelation, Jeff Berman, a history professor at a small college in Pennsylvania. Jeff’s book, The Petitjohn Letters, investigates correspondence between James Buchanan, our 15th president, and his aide Roland Petitjohn, which indicates that the relationship between them was a sexual as well as emotional one.

The Buchanan Letters develops what happens after Jeff’s book is published. Suddenly, he’s at the focus of a firestorm of publicity. From interviews in the local paper to appearances on national TV news programs, Jeff’s in the spotlight, being grilled about his scholarship and ultimately his personal life.

At its heart, The Buchanan Letters is about a man who has built his life around a goal which he ultimately realizes to be the wrong one for him. During the book he’s used and abused, loved and hated, befriended and betrayed. Pascal Montrouge, a handsome, sexy newspaper reporter who’s clawing his way back up after a deadly slide uses Jeff’s book as a stepping stone to a new career. But does Pascal really love him?

Interspersed with copies of the letters Jeff finds, The Buchanan Letters is a timely novel with a timeless heart: one man’s search for love and meaning in his life.

Buy The Buchanan Letters now from the MLR website