One of the authors I follow and fangirl about is Jennifer Crusie. Her blog is a mine of priceless information about the craft of writing. Last year she wrote about structure, which gave me the idea of deliberately plotting a novel - something I haven’t, to be honest, really done before. The result is PUBLIC OFFERING. Click the image below for product link!
Cover image by Christian Buehner @christianbuehner unsplash.com, with thanks!
Three key things about PUBLIC OFFERING:
The main characters are Julian Sherwood, a 36-year-old venture capitalist from London, and Forrest Kim, a 33-year-old patent attorney in Los Angeles;
Their first encounter is a hookup which neither of them expects to repeat;
Over the course of two years, a series of mostly-unplanned meetings and some heart-to-heart conversations with friends and family lead to the conclusion that they’ve actually … fallen in love.
Most of the time when I begin a story it’s with a particular scene in my head, or with a question about a character I’ve already created for some other story. This time I began with the idea that two men would meet over and over without ever discussing why, and then examined the consequences.
Julian is at Forrest’s law firm and sees the man; he issues an invitation, and Forrest decides to accept. This is the pattern for ten encounters: Julian is in L.A., for whatever reason; he sends a text; they meet. Until the time when Forrest’s job gives him an excuse to say No and break a connection that’s begun to break his heart.
Going into a story with the intention of making things Go Very Wrong at some point is not my usual! I’ve only done it once before, in the F/M/M novella A SECRET CHORD. Perhaps coincidentally, that novella introduced the character Geoffrey Anand, who’s a friend of Julian’s in PUBLIC OFFERING. Geoffrey gets his own HEA in M/M/F novel A BRAID OF LOVE.
The other existing character playing a part in PUBLIC OFFERING is Stella Liu. She contacts Forrest for professional reasons and they rapidly become friends. Which is good, because a man needs a friend when he’s falling for someone who’s never going to be there for him.
PUBLIC OFFERING is a fairly tropey book. There’s the rich / not rich thing; the billionaire-lifestyle thing; the power imbalance thing; the interracial thing (Julian is English with white and Indian ancestors, Forrest is Korean-American); the we-live-on-separate-continents thing; the one-night-stand thing.
It is also about the kind of sexual encounter that many consider transgressive, but (as usual) I have not emphasized the sex. I swear, I’ve tried to write things where the characters have a ton of explicit on-page sex, and it just never works for me. I mean yes, Forrest and Julian have plenty of sex on the page - all of chapter one is about their first encounter - but this (like all my stuff) is more about what happens in people’s heads than what happens in their pants.
I really like this book. Hope you will too.