Beat: a novel with a new look
The fifth-published novel in my story universe has a new cover! It also received a complete rewrite along the way to joining my wide launch in 2023. Click BEAT for a Books2Read link; click the image below for AMZ link.
Cover image courtesy of Damon Zaidmus @touchdamonlight unsplash.com. Thanks for making this image available!
Once upon a time - seven years ago, in fact - I wrote a fast-paced little thing about a twenty-three-year-old draftsman and a thirty-year-old retail manager whose relationship got off to a great start and then … ended. Until the younger man decided to try again.
Three key things about BEAT:
It is a second-chance interracial love story with an age gap.
Mateo de la Cruz and Sam Lee are very different guys, from very different backgrounds: Mateo is from a large, close-knit Filipino family; Sam grew up in the foster-care system.
There is a lot (like, a lot) of dancing. Mateo is a past member of the Cal Poly Pomona ballroom team; Sam is a recreational salsa dancer. Dance becomes their sport, as well as their creative outlet.
Sam and Mateo have a presence in quite a few of my stories. Until late 2018 (in series time) they live in West Hollywood, in walking distance to my fictional ballroom studio Shall We Dance.
Mateo begins to grow as a choreographer with the Beowulf-based dance concert ‘Green Darkness.’ He’s chosen for that project because of work he and Sam do with my fictional semi-pro dance company the Underground Cabaret. The next big evolution for Mateo comes with the tango show ‘Gaucho,’ described in FACE THE MUSIC.
This novel started life as a novella. Giving previously-established characters a full world to live in, instead of merely a sketch, led to discovering new relationships and even new characters. I always want the friendship network to make sense. I’m dealing here with a found family, in which people from various professions come together based on shared values and interests to - essentially - make art. Not every character has a strong connection to every other character.
This sort of combination tends - in my observation - to operate like a solar system. There is a sun (in this case Dmitri Vasko, head of Shall We Dance), there are orbiting planets (like Sam and Mateo, or their friends Vince and Kelli (SMOOTH)), there are satellites to those planets (such as Richard Hollister, who has a bit part in BEAT but who is one of the stars of my novel TAKE EVERYTHING).
But these systems are not stable. Sometimes a satellite breaks out of its orbit and turns into a planet! And sometimes a planet turns into a new sun. Mateo may one day become a sun; he’s still young.
