Welcome to Lynn Lorenz's guest blog

I want to say thanks to Love Romances and more for giving me the opportunity to talk about something near and dear to my heart – my books.

Every few months or so I get a chance to recapture that incredible feeling – a mixture of excitement, hope, fear and accomplishment – that publishing a new book brings us authors.

You know, it doesn’t take much positive re-enforcement to keep rats running around a maze searching for a small piece of cheese. They’ll do just about anything to get it. Push a bar, press a button, kill each other. It’s like that for writers. One taste of the cheddar cheese of publishing and we’re hooked. And we’d do just about anything to get it…write at all hours of the day, ignore our friends and family, lock ourselves in a room with only a game of solitaire or spider to procrastinate with, a box of chocolate and only our characters to keep us company. And when the words are flowing or we’re on deadline, stand back. Nothing is beneath us. I’ll even admit to calling in sick to work (it was only one day, I swear) to stay home and write.

Okay, I did just compare writers to rats, but only in a good way.

So, just call me Minnie Mouse - I’m hooked. God, I hope they never come out with a 12-step program to cure authors of their insatiable need to write and be published. Or banish us to the “no-writing” section of Starbucks, B&N or anywhere we can open our laptops and get busy. Before you know it, we could be condemned to meeting in small rooms over bookstores, in corners of libraries, and in friends’ homes, sharing our work and looking for insight and feedback and validation. Or heaven forbid, hiding who we really are behind pen names and what we write from our colleagues at work, and our less understanding friends and family.

Oh, wait. We do that now. My bad.

I’ll gladly stand up and admit it. I’m in love with writing. With putting words down, having them make sense, telling a story. I’m in love with my characters, the good and the bad. I’m in love with editing (I know, I’m warped), searching for just the right words, catching those mistakes that make me cringe, cutting, adding and re-writing.

So, in light of the fact that I’m hopelessly addicted and have no intentions of renouncing my membership in the secret and scandalous erotic romance author society, I might as well go all the way and be shameless in my chosen addiction by jumping into the deep end of it - self-promotion.

Beware! Advertisement looming! Excerpt coming! Shameless promotion!

I’m Lynn Lorenz, erotic romance writer, and I have a new book being released on Tuesday, August 25th from Loose Id and even though it’s my twelfth book (not that I’m counting) it still feels like it did the first time. My heart pounds, my hands are clammy, I’m flushed and smile for no reason at all.

Is it love or maybe the way the rat feels when he knows he’s just a few left turns from that cheese?

That being said, here’s the blurb and an excerpt from my newest book, Best Vacation That Never Was, a contemporary m/m romance, available Tuesday from Loose Id.


Blurb – Troy Hastings has planned his dream vacation right down to the last detail. After all, it’s his one chance to get the man he’s crushing on, Douglas, to fall in love with him. But when Troy’s apartment building burns to the ground, with everything Troy owns inside, he’s left with nothing, even his vacation is gone. Firefighter Jason Cooper never expected to be so drawn to the man he rescues from the burning building, so when he finds Troy in the emergency room, he does something he’s never done before, invite a man to stay with him for more than one night.

Excerpt (1)
Troy opened his eyes to a loud, insistent, and very unfamiliar blaring. He sat up in the tub, sloshing water over the sides, and looked around.
Was that the smoke detector?
“Couldn’t be.” He hadn’t left anything on in the apartment. Nothing cooking. No candles lit except in here. He looked at them, then decided they weren’t the problem.
He sniffed the air like a dog.
“Shit! That’s smoke!” He surged out of the tub and grabbed a towel. Dripping water across the tile floor, he rushed to the door.
Gray smoke, thin and hesitant, as if it had a secret, seeped under the bathroom door.
Troy grabbed the doorknob. “Fuck!”
Pain shot through him like he’d touched a hot pan’s unprotected handle on the stove. He shook his hand, gave it a quick look, then went to the sink, and turned on the taps. Holding his hand under the water, he grimaced as the pain subsided.
Smoke wound around his knees like a cat and he coughed. The room had become a sauna, hot moist heat baking him. He’d never liked saunas.
Somehow, unbelievably, his apartment was on fire.
Adrenaline exploded through his body like an orgasm.
Fight or flight?
No choice. He needed to get the hell out of there. Panic built like a coiled spring as Troy scanned the small bath. The window over the tub was his only exit.
Blinking back tears, he scooped up the towel he’d let drop to the floor and plunged it into the bathtub of water, then pulled it out. Slinging the sopping terrycloth around his waist, Troy’s hands shook as he jerked another towel off the bar next to the sink and doused it in the tub.
Coughing, he wiped his face then flung the soaking towel over his head. After climbing up on the tub, he balanced on the edge as he flipped open the locks and pushed the window up.
Wisps of gray escaped before he could get the window open wide enough to crawl out. His eyes watered, nose ran, and sweat dripped. He wiped his face again. The towel wasn’t as wet as it had been just a moment ago.
The sauna had disappeared. He was trapped in a fucking oven.
And he was going to die. Burned to death.
Heart slamming in his chest, he and the smoke vied for the small space of the open window. He got his legs through and sat on the ledge. Twisting his body, he maneuvered his shoulders and head out and at last he gulped down clean air.
He looked down. Eyes watering so badly he could barely see, he coughed and his body trembled. He didn’t need to see to know he was three floors up.
Every muscle, every nerve, every fiber in his body, and every neuron fired in his mind, screamed at him to jump. To leap. To fly. To just get the fuck away from being burned alive.
Troy sat on the window sill, refusing to obey.
Even as one part of his mind tried to kill him, another part kept him alive.
Behind him, a burst of heat seared the bare skin on his back. Too terrified to look, knowing the bathroom would soon be in flames, he shifted farther out onto the ledge.
Sirens in the distance.
Nearly blind, choking, he wept. He would be rescued. He just had to hold on.
Troy cleared away the mixture of sweat and tears dripping down his face with the now dry towel and looked down. A small ledge ran along the bottom of the window, nothing more than a row of bricks standing out from the façade. Nothing more than a toehold.
He took a deep breath, twisted, and holding on to the sill, faced the building and stared through the window. Hell burned on the other side of his bathroom door, outlining the flimsy barrier in bright red.
He had to move. Now.
Fingers clinging onto what little purchase he could find, barefooted, he flattened his body against the bricks, and stepped onto the thin ledge as if it were a tightrope and he were a fucking Wallenda.
* * * * *
Every time Jason rode the engine to a call, it was a wild rush. This was something he never wanted to get used to. Maybe when he was old and gray. Hell, maybe never. He’d done a lot of crazy shit in his life, but this? It didn’t get any better.
He glanced from the backseat of the cabin of the pride of Engine Company Twenty-Five to his boss, Lieutenant Alan Morris, riding shotgun. Eyes closed and head nodding as he slept, the man looked like he could be on a Sunday drive with the family, instead of in a forty foot long ladder truck on his way to a two-alarm fire.
“Yeeehaaww!” Jason whooped, just to get the old man going.
“Shit, Cooper. I was taking a nap.” Morris groaned and tipped his helmet over his face.
“Coming up now!” The driver’s voice crackled over their headsets. “Get ready to rock and roll!” In the background, Jason heard the driver notifying command of their arrival and switching to the tactical channel for communications.
Jason snapped his chin strap to the helmet and grinned at the man sitting behind Morris, a new recruit named Tom. The twenty-one year old had that gleam in his eyes, as if he’d just been told he was going to be let loose in a candy store with a shopping cart and it was all fucking free.
He reached out and slapped the guy’s arm. “Take the controls this time.” Morris opened his eyes and gave Jason a nod. Jason returned a wink.
“No shit? I get to launch the ladder?”
“If we need it, sure. No better experience than in the field.” Jason knew you could practice this at the training facility until you had it down pat, but nothing beat having to perform in an actual fire.
The sirens of the other units, police, fire, with a couple of ambulances thrown in, filled the night air and made the only music he danced to. His heart beat faster as the adrenaline in his system ratcheted up a notch. Man, there was nothing better to climb the ladder with than colored lights strobing off the glass of the surrounding buildings. Hell, it was his personal dance club.
And he was here for the party.
The truck slowed, then came to a stop near the first available hydrant, the doors opened. Jason swung out of the cabin with Tom right behind him, and they ran to the back of the truck. After pulling out the hose, they slung it around the hydrant, and motioned for the truck to continue up to its position near the building, deploying the rest of the hose. He and Tom worked like a two-man precision drill team to break the cap and attach to hose to the hydrant. That done, they trotted up to the back of their parked truck. They might not use the water, but they had to be connected just in case.
At the rear of the ladder truck, Tom joined him at the controls.
“What do we have?” he asked.
Jason surveyed the building. “Holy mother of God.” He gave a low, soft whistle.
Flames erupted from windows along the entire third floor, and the fourth floor, the building’s top floor, had at least two units burning. It wouldn’t be long before that entire floor was engulfed too.
“They’re going to have to roll to a four alarm.” That would bring in the neighboring fire districts.
Police held back the crowd as members of the other fire units’ search teams entered the burning building. Cops and firemen evacuated the adjoining buildings, emptying men, women, and children onto the streets. The cops moved them to a safe location down the block, but kept them herded together for a head count.
To the untrained eye, it might have looked like chaos, but to Jason, it was a well-choreographed ballet. Half a dozen vehicles disgorged massive long hoses from their back ends like giant insects giving birth, as his counterparts raced to nearby hydrants, broke the caps, hooked up the hoses, and opened the valves. As a rolling wave of water filled each hose, they came to life, powerful snakes being charmed by men and women trained to handle them.
Tom pointed. “Up there. Shit. Is that a man?”
Jason’s gaze followed Tom’s arm. He squinted through the haze of smoke and embers.
“Fuck.”
Halfway between two windows spewing flames, a man clung like a fly to the side of the building.
“What the hell is he holding on to?” Tom shouted.
“I don’t know, but we’re going for him.” Jason slapped Tom’s helmet and jerked his thumb up. Like a precision drill team, Tom and he went into action, lowering the four hydraulic stabilizers in place to keep the rig from tipping over. Once that was done, he watched as Tom rotated the ladder into position.
Jason counted the seconds as the ladder unfolded, one section sliding out at a time. And taking way too long. He stared up at the man, assessing him.
Strong back muscles corded with effort, the skin covering them slick with sweat and black from smoke or maybe burns. Fuck. Head to the side, long arms outstretched, and fingers gripped brick to hold him in place.
He wore nothing but a towel wrapped around his narrow waist, covering an ass that Jason wanted to see naked. Oh shit. Some of the guys laughed about getting hard just being in the midst of the action at a fire; hell, he’d experienced it himself. But damn, he wasn’t supposed to get hard looking at someone he was about to rescue.
Once the ladder extended far enough to reach their target, Jason began his climb. Halfway up, he called out to the man, “Fire department. I’m coming to get you. Hold on.”
“What the fuck do you think I’m doing?” the guy yelled back, then coughed.
With an attitude like that, Jason knew the guy would be all right.
“Almost to you.”
“Hurry. Please.”
This time Jason heard the fear in the guy’s voice. “I’m going to help you onto the ladder, then you’re going to have to climb down. Do you think you can do that?” At the top of the ladder now, Jason reached up and touched the man’s calf.
“Yes. I can do that.” He nodded.
“I’m going to climb up over you, then back you down onto the ladder.”
The man coughed and nodded again. Jason climbed higher on the ladder and put his gloved hands on the man’s waist, but they slid off sweat-slicked skin.
“Shit.” He wiped his gloves off on the towel, brushing the backs of the guy’s thighs.
“Hey. Don’t get fresh. We haven’t been introduced.” The man choked. He leaned his head against the heated bricks. “Just get me down.” He shuddered.
“It’s going to be okay, man. I got you.” Jason took him by the waist and eased him back. “Step back. Put your foot on the rung of the ladder.”
“Okay.” He took his foot off the ledge and his hands slid down the bricks. “Don’t let me fall.” His foot, still on the ledge, trembled and Jason felt it through the man’s straining body.
Jason pressed into his back to let him know he was right there. “I’ve got you. Feel me? I’m not going to let you fall.”
Coughing, the man lowered himself, sliding down the front of Jason’s jacket, his ass pressing against Jason’s groin. Jesus he shouldn’t be turned on, but he was. How twisted was that?
Jason wrapped one arm around the man’s body and held him as he got both feet onto the ladder.
“Now, we go down.”
“Okay.”
Jason moved his hand over the man’s sweat drenched chest. He couldn’t resist pressing against his well-defined pec and wishing he could feel that hard nipple with the bare palm of his hand.
The man reached up and covered Jason’s larger gloved hand with his. And pressed it into his body, keeping Jason right where he was.
Oh shit. He pulled his hand away to grab the handrails of the ladder.
Jason began his descent, one rung at a time, the guy following, his towel covered bottom just above Jason’s head. If Jason reached up he could jerk the towel off and get a good look at that tight ass. The view of muscular thighs was killing him, keeping him hard.
“Cooper, what’s going on up there?” Tom’s voice interrupted Jason’s randy thoughts, thank God.
“Taking it slow. He’s pretty shaky. Want to make sure he gets down.”
“Good man.”
Jason groaned. He wasn’t a good man, he was a horny man.
And he wanted the guy in the towel.


So, if you got this far and you leave a comment on the blog telling me what the most shameful thing you’ve done to keep writing when the muse was on you or if you’re a reader, the most shameful thing you’ve done to keep reading that book you just couldn’t put down, then you’re entered into the drawing for a copy of Next Vacation That Never Was.
I choose the winner on Tuesday evening, so you have two days to comment. Multiple posts don’t count, dudes. One entry per name.

Lynn Lorenz
When you open your heart, you open your mind.
www.lynnlorenz.com