We’re so pleased to welcome author Leta Blake today, on the tour for Will & Patrick Wake Up Married: The Complete Serial. If you’ve read this series, I think you’re going to love this guest post. If you haven’t, you’ll be gaining a pretty cool perspective on the Patrick half of this couple before you do.
Enjoy and then be sure to check out the details for the Rafflecopter giveaway below!
Gender and what we make of it….
Our culture puts a lot of stock in gender. This bathroom mess is only the tip of the iceberg. We see it from the earliest of moments in a child’s life, the way his/her/their perceived gender puts them in a cage of one kind or another. The dressing of the cage might be different, but they’re cages all the same.
A game I enjoy playing with my daughter is re-imagining the gender of characters in tv shows, plays, and books. Right now, my kid is obsessed with the musical Hamilton. And, frankly, so am I. Her favorite parts of the play are performed by men, and she’s taken to playing them out in her mind with the genders changed up. She’s Alexandra Hamilton and Erin Burr and Thomasina Jefferson in her mind as she performs those bits passionately.
The other day, I ran across a cover of the Hamilton song Wait For It performed acoustically by a woman named Randy Shuit and it sent shivers all over me. Just imagining the performance this woman might give and how the perceived gender of the performer changes our understanding of the piece, deepens it at times, flushes it with even more meaning than it already held, because for a woman to say these things means something slightly different in this world.
If you’d like to hear it for yourself, here’s the link. I’ve become obsessed with it (and so have some of my characters from a future book). I listen to it constantly.
A few months ago, my mother, an avid romance reader of both m/f and m/m romance, asked me why I couldn’t write just a few m/f books. I told her I did have a few ideas for heterosexual romances, but that they were several years out still. She said, “But why couldn’t this last serial have been with a man and a woman?”
“Because they came to me as men,” I answered.
“But you didn’t have to keep it that way. You could have made Patrick into Patricia and told the same story.”
I told her that, no, that’s not how it really works. Patrick was always a dude and always would be in my mind, but I sat there with her comments for a while after she left, pondering the idea of Patrick as Patricia.
Snarky, blunt, on the autism-spectrum Patrick as a Patricia.
Wow.
I realized I thought readers would hate her. As a man, we give him the asshole-with-a-heart-of-gold pass, but as a woman? She’d be seen as irredeemable by so many readers and that made me just sit there with a pain in my heart. For women on the autism spectrum, for me, for women who have to fit a totally different mold than a man to be considered acceptable.
Gender and what we make of it… The cages around us, the culture that binds us, and we just live in it so deeply that most of the time we don’t even notice. Until your mom suggests that Patrick be Patricia and then you hear that cage door rattle, reminding you that you’re locked in.
The Wake Up Married serial is now available in several ways:
On Amazon:
- it’s available in individual episodes (with the first episode priced at a low .99 and the rest at $2.99): http://www.amazon.com/gp/bookseries/B017PJOYU0/
- It’s available in deal bundles where you can save between almost $6 or $7 depending on which bundle option you choose:
Episodes 1-3 for $4.99: Amazon
Episodes 4-6 for $4.99: Amazon
Episodes 1-6 for $8.99: Amazon
At other retailers: Because we are removing the Wake Up Married serial from Kindle Unlimited (which required exclusivity), we currently only have the first three episodes out at other sites. The rest will be available on these sites by the end of July.
Kobo || Barnes & Noble || iTunes || ARe || Scribd
Episode One: Will & Patrick Wake Up Married
After a drunken night of hot sex in Vegas, strangers Will Patterson and Dr. Patrick McCloud wake up married. A quickie divorce is the most obvious way out—unless you’re the heir of a staunchly Catholic mafia boss with a draconian position on the sanctity of marriage. Throw their simmering attraction into the mix and all bets are off!
Episode Two: Will & Patrick Meet the Family
Meeting the family is challenging for every new couple. But for Will and Patrick, the awkward family moments only grow more hilarious–and painful–when they must hide the truth of their predicament from the people they care about most. Throw in the sexual tension flaring between them and you’ve got a recipe for madcap laughs and surprisingly heartwarming feels.
Episode Three: Will & Patrick Do the Holidays
A couple’s first holiday season is always a special time. Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve are magical when you’re in love. Too bad Will and Patrick’s marriage is a sham and they’re only faking their affection for each other. Or are they? Sparks fly in this episode of the Wake Up Married serial. Will the sexual tension between Will and Patrick finally explode in a needy night of passion? Or will they continue to deny their feelings?
Episode Four: Will & Patrick Fight Their Feelings
Will and Patrick have embraced adding hot sexy-times to their fake marriage, but as their emotions deepen, they confront whether or not they want to be more than friends-with-benefits. The heat is high (and occasionally kinky) as Will and Patrick struggle to accept their mutual affection.
Episode Five: Will & Patrick Meet the Mob
Patrick has finally accepted that he’s in love with Will, but his newfound determination to do something about that runs up against his father-in-law’s mobster plans. Will must face the truth about his family before he can fully come to terms with his feelings for Patrick. And Patrick has to decide if this whackadoodle world is something he truly wants to be part of forever.
Episode Six: Will & Patrick’s Happy Ending
Sure, Will and Patrick are in love now, but they weren’t when they got married in Vegas. For Patrick, that’s no problem, but Will can’t shake his doubts that a relationship started through coercion can ever become the real deal. Since the Molinaro crime family has reversed their position on divorce, Will and Patrick have a chance to rectify their drunken mistake. But is divorce the right choice for them?
About the Authors
Leta Blake: Author of the bestselling book Smoky Mountain Dreams and the fan favorite Training Season, Leta Blake’s educational and professional background is in psychology and finance, respectively. However, her passion has always been for writing. She enjoys crafting romance stories and exploring the psyches of made up people. At home in the Southern U.S., Leta works hard at achieving balance between her day job, her writing, and her family.
You can find out more about her by following her online.
Alice Griffiths: A long-time reader of romance novels, Alice Griffiths finally took the plunge into writing, teaming up with best-selling author Leta Blake for the ‘Woke up Married’ serialized comedy. A lover of tropes, Alice enjoys mining old ideas and putting a fresh, funny spin on them. Formerly working in the newspaper industry, Alice is now an art curator. She lives in Sydney, Australia.
You can find out more about her by following her online.
The Giveaway
a Rafflecopter giveaway
https://widget-prime.rafflecopter.com/launch.js
Follow the Tour
6/13/2016 The Novel Approach
6/14/2016 Love Bytes Reviews
6/15/2016 Sinfully
6/16/2016 BFD Book Blog
6/17/2016 Prism Book Alliance
Thank you for the post!
I really enjoyed this series!