Hi lovelies! It gives me great pleasure today to host Amanda
Meuwissen and her new book, “Lovesick Titans”!
For other stops on her Goddess Fish Promotions Book Tour, please click
on the banner above or any of the images in this post.
Be sure to make it to the end
of this post to enter to win a $25 Amazon or Barnes and Noble Gift Card!! Also, come back daily to interact with Amanda
and to increase your chances of winning!
Thanks for stopping by! Wishing you lots of luck in this fabulous
giveaway!
Lovesick Titans
by Amanda Meuwissen
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GENRE: Gay Romance, Superhero
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BLURB:
Not even a Titan can always stand up to a God.
Malcom
Cho is in over his head, wrapped up in a love affair with his superhero nemesis
Zeus, who most people in Olympus City only know as Detective Danny Grant.
Lovesick
Titans begins where Lovesick Gods left off, after a heist gone wrong that ended
with a museum guard dead and Mal and Danny beaten and exhausted from their
fight with the new threat in town, Cassidy Ludgate—Hades.
Unaware
that Ludgate’s true motivation is revenge for the death of his father at Zeus’s
hands, Mal wants only to keep Danny close, while Danny races to solve the cases
surrounding Ludgate to stop him from whatever he has planned for them next.
What
Mal doesn’t know is that Danny didn’t pursue him with the purest of intentions
but sought to break his heart in retaliation for not being there when he needed
him in the fight against Thanatos. Even though Danny no longer seeks that end,
the lies between them loom like a shadow about to descend upon them both.
And Hades has only begun to toy with them…
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EXCERPT ONE:
Danny
let Mal hold his hand in place on his arm, while his other hand strayed,
drifting down to Mal’s hip and resting at the edge of one of his larger scars.
Mal had many, from years of abuse and a hard way of living. Normally, when
Danny touched one, he pushed on with confidence, but tonight, the raised scar
tissue made him snap to his senses like he’d been in a trance.
“Sorry,”
he said and pulled both hands away.
But
Mal reached for them, hung onto them, and brought Danny’s hands back to his
skin. “It’s okay. Broken bottle one night when Dad got drunk. Now I get to add
another knife wound to the collection.” Mal smirked as he nodded at his
bandaged arm.
Danny
smiled with him, but it was a sad, shattered expression. He teased the tips of
his fingers over the scar tissue. “Are all these really from…” With a startle,
he tried to pull away again as if he’d said something he shouldn’t.
“My
father?” Mal said, refusing to let him go. “Not all. Most though. Some are from
prison. Some dumb mistakes. Fights like tonight. But most…yeah, they’re his.”
Taking
Danny’s hand still resting on his hip, Mal drew it upwards, guiding it across
his bare chest until he reached his shoulder and the faint circular scar tissue
near his clavicle.
“Freezer
burn. From his powers. Because I broke my leg when I was eight and I cried. He
wanted to teach me a lesson. Teach me how to keep pain in and never let anyone
see it. So he held the tip of a frozen finger there until it burned.”
Danny’s
brow furrowed with indignant anger.
Mal
trailed the hand lower to a particularly bad scar across his stomach—his worst
and the one he remembered the clearest. “First knife wound. Caught me with a
boy in my room. Would have killed him if I hadn’t stood in the way. I took the
brunt of it. Let him run off. Never brought a boy home again, not ‘til Dad was
gone. Brought a couple girls home,” he shrugged.
“Girls?”
Danny asked with a touch of humored skepticism bleeding through his concern. He
splayed his hand flat against Mal’s stomach, warm and intimate in his touch.
“Occasionally.
Not as often.”
Danny
nodded but his smile quickly faded, his eyes trained on the scar and the
affectionate way he traced it with his fingers. “Sometimes…I think my dad hates
me because…” he trailed and the motion of his hand slowed. “There’s something I
never told you. About the night I killed Thanatos.”
The
smile dropped from Mal’s lips as well as he waited for Danny to continue.
“He
killed my mom.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
GUEST POST:
The Character I Identify Most With
Many
authors identify with their heroes. In my case, my ‘hero’ is an actual
superhero. He’s also more villainous than his nemesis.
The
Lovesick Series, made up of Lovesick Gods and the new release Lovesick Titans,
has two equal protagonists – Danny Grant, who is secretly the Lightning
Elemental superhero Zeus, and Malcolm Cho, better known as the Ice Elemental
thief Prometheus. The real villain and antagonist of the story is both a
separate villain, Hades, and the emotional hurdles faced by the characters as
they grow closer and try to find a relationship through their difficult pasts
and behaviors.
It’s
not a spoiler even for the first book to say that Danny isn’t being his best
hero self at the start of this tale, as he immediately decides that the only
way to get out of his recent depression is by hurting someone who once hurt
him—Mal. He wants Mal to fall in love with him just so he can break his heart,
and hey, getting some no-strings-attached sex isn’t a bad bonus.
Now,
I never enacted any sort of elaborately cruel scheme like this, but the
portrayal of Danny’s bipolar depression, how he acts out, how amazing his
supports structure is to bring him back, and having a partner who forgives and
relates and still wants to be with him, is all a reflection of my own
experiences.
Too
often we try to ignore mental disorders and disabilities faced by the people
around us, or maybe we simply don’t know how to help. Sometimes talking is
enough, sometimes medication is needed, sometimes it just takes time and
patience, or maybe a combination of all the above.
It
was a very therapeutic process for me to write this story and to pull Danny through
the worst of his rock bottom and back on a road to recovery. We think of heroes
as invincible, especially in comic books, which this tale is largely inspired
by since I am a comic book geek, but what makes them well-rounded and
interesting is when they reflect us, and we see that not even the ‘best’ of us
is ever perfect or even okay some of the time.
And
it’s okay to not be okay.
I’ve
had many fans tell me how impactful reading this was for them, because they’ve
been there too, and seeing a real portrayal of depression with a real ray of
hope at the end gives us all a little more strength to push on.
I was
writing this long after the brunt of the worst of my depression had passed, and
yet it still snuck up on me as something I didn’t realize I needed to tell as a
unique story. This series makes it finally feel like a chapter I’ve closed
(however much I continue to cope each day) through characters I adore, with an
emotional ride of angst (but I promise with a happy ending) and the
enemies-to-lovers trope turned on its head in a way I could not be prouder of.
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AUTHOR BIO:
Amanda Meuwissen has
been writing and posting online for many years, including maintaining the
website and blog for the software company Outsell. She is an avid writer and
consumer of fiction through film, prose, and video games, and is the author of
the paranormal romance trilogy The Incubus Saga and young adult novel Life as a
Teenage Vampire. Amanda lives in Minneapolis, MN, with her husband, John, and
their two cats.
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CONNECT WITH AMANDA:
Website:
Blog:
Facebook:
Twitter:
Tumblr:
LinkedIn:
Goodreads Author Page:
Goodreads Book Page:
Amazon Author Page:
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AMAZON BOOK BUY LINKS:
Amazon Kindle:
Amazon Paperback:
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GIVEAWAY INFO:
Amanda will be awarding a $25 Amazon or B/N GC
to a randomly drawn winner via Rafflecopter during the tour.
**This post contains affiliate links and if clicked and a
purchase made I may receive a small commission to help support this blog. This does not cost you anything, it just
helps pay for all those awesome giveaways on here.**
This contest is sponsored
by a third party. Fabulous and Brunette is a registered host of Goddess Fish
Promotions. Prizes are given away by the
sponsors and not Fabulous and Brunette. The featured author and Goddess Fish
Promotions are solely responsible for the giveaway prize.
Thanks for hosting!
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed getting to know your book and thanks for the chance to win :)
ReplyDeleteThank you so much for the stop and the chance to write this post. It really is an important message to me above and beyond the love of superheroes and angsty romance and integrated plot points - our mental health is something we need more stories about, and it plays a huge role in many of our lives. Thanks so much again!
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing the great post!
ReplyDeleteCongrats on the tour and thank you for the opportunity to read about another great book. With so many readers in my family, always great to hear about more choices I think they'd enjoy reading.
ReplyDelete