I decided to put my four books starring Andy Martin & Victor Garcia on sale for 99c each for the month of September. Partly this is so I had a sale to announce, and partly it’s because I’ve acquired some new readers over the past year who might not have discovered these books and/or might have been daunted by the fact that there are four of them. Even at self-publishing prices, four books can add up to a lot for people on a reading budget!
Photo by Christian Buehner at unsplash.com
The above is one of the images my designer & I considered for Never Enough. This handsome fellow is close to how I imagine Victor, a Mexican American actor. The handsome fellow I see as Andy (a Puerto Rican American) appears on the cover of Exposure.
ABOUT THE CO-STARS BOOKS:
All can be read on their own; each resolves its internal plot and has a HFN or HEA ending. You can click the highlighted titles to reach the AMZ pages, or click Books2Read for universal buy links.
EXPOSURE: Co-Stars Book One spans multiple years and covers Andy and Victor’s first encounter, its unhappy aftermath, a year of Maybe, and the growth of their relationship up to the point of cohabiting. Along the way Andy is hired to play a role on the long-running cop show in which Victor plays an LAPD detective. They also adopt a dog. Books2Read
THE GHOST OF CARLOS GARDEL: Book Two is not a ghost story! It’s about Andy & Victor making a movie called The Ghost of Carlos Gardel, which is about a (real) world-famous tango singer who died young in a plane crash in the 1930s. The movie is written by their mutual friend Tanith Salazar, who shares POV in this book. (Tanith is the star of my novel Million Dollar Death.) Books2Read
NEVER ENOUGH: Book Three mostly takes place over the course of a single year and concerns Andy & Victor’s first major conflict. Victor has landed a role co-starring in an action comedy franchise; here, he’s away on location while Andy’s father is dying. The time apart contributes to some long-simmering insecurities. Books2Read
UNMASKED: Book Four also takes mostly place over the course of a year, which in this case is the year 2019-2020. Because these books are set in the real world, that means Andy & Victor are coping with the global pandemic, trying to salvage movie projects they’ve each booked for the summer of 2020, and finding other ways to pursue creative projects that can’t be live and in person. This book will plunge you into their large community, but at least one reviewer thought I tied up all the threads. Books2Read
THREE KEY THINGS ABOUT THE CO-STARS:
Andy, as written, is a few years younger than I am in real life. He’s in his mid-forties when Exposure begins and has made practical compromises to live a stable life instead of fully indulging his abundant creativity and talent. Victor, ten years younger, is just beginning to embrace the scope of his own talent. I’m giving these two all the freedom to explore their creativity I wish I’d had, and the success I love to see for diverse creatives in real life.
The age gap is A Thing throughout the series. An age gap in a relationship only matters when one person has a lot less life experience than the other. That’s the case with Andy & Victor and is the primary source of conflict in their relationship. Most of their challenges are external, but when you have two ambitious men whose professions go from adjacent to intertwined, friction is inevitable. And not always the sexy kind of friction.
3. All of these books are slice-of-life, though each centers on particular creative projects. You will meet a whole lot of other characters, most of whom have their own stories somewhere in my universe.
Bonus key thing: a fifth book in this series is in the works! It’s set in 2021, will stay mostly in Los Angeles, and will deal mostly with a particular stage musical discussed in Book Four.
Co-Stars Book Five is top of my queue to write in 2025. I’d love to hear from readers curious about where Andy & Victor go next.