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Damon Suede Interview

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Today we’re peeling the veil back from author Damon Suede who is somewhat of a mystery man. Damon is also a new guest reviewer on the site and readers and authors alike anxiously await his reviews. He is building up quite a fan base which has nothing to do with him being a newly minted M/M author. One writer, who shall remain anonymous, recently said that if she ever had a 1 star review she hoped Damon would write it. WOW!!

Damon has just released his first M/M novel after toiling in the more lucrative fields of screen writing and print. Why, I wondered, would he want to make such a radical change? I think I’ll ask him. 😕

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Hi Damon
It’s great to grill you and then turn you over to the readers. Many of us can’t wait for your first M/M book Hot Head which I will come to in a bit. But first, what can you tell us about Damon the person and the author? Is there a difference? Is one cuter than the other?

The author is WAY cuter, obviously! Damon the person has bedhead and forgets things and gets erections at inopportune moments. Damon the author has his own theme music, impeccable style, and can leap towering clichés in a single bound.

Nah. Actually, they’re both somewhere in the middle there. In all seriousness, I think most people do most things the way they do most other things. My M/M work is as much an expression of my core as my more serious, “literary” work and my shameless grease-it-up-stick-it-in showbiz gigs.

I’m one of those people who live out loud, as in, constantly… enthusiastic about anything I commit to and a live wire in social settings and relentless professionally. No shame. No guilt. No apologies. Totally choleric. I’m chronically impatient and have a bad habit of gift-of-gabbing my way out of anything. I tend to wind up leading groups I join. I guarantee that if we were sitting together at a table right now what you’d notice first is speed, aggression, and energy.

I don’t watch TV. I have a real bug up my ass about it actually, because I think television wrecks everyone’s writing, even television writers. But in the summers during rough drafting binges I’ll often plow through an entire HBO/Showtime show in one go, years after it ends. Well, back when Queer as Folk was on, I never saw it. At the time, friends, enemies, and even random strangers would thump me on the back and say, “You’re like that asshole Brian Kinney.” I had no idea what they were talking about. I finally saw the show about 2 years ago… and discovered I’m even more like him than people had realized. Truth is I’ve been living like Brian Kinney since I was about 12, for better or worse: severity, strategy, sexual aggression, sentiment, ruthlessness, pride and pain, kinkiness, control, black humor. The whole megillah. Watching that show in a 3 day marathon, he seemed like the only normal character. Which either makes me a prick or shows I have balls. Tough call.

Bottom line: folks either love me or loathe me. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned to dial things down and take a breath and not stomp around from the get-go, but I’m pretty intense even at my calmest.

You write screen plays and have published books in other genres, so why did you want to sample the less than lucrative field of epublishing and M/M romances?


FREEDOM! I’ve spent over 20 years writing professionally in entertainment, and navigating the shoals of ego and idiocy. Showbiz bureaucracy can do foul things to your Muse if you relax your vigilance.
So… for the past decade or so I’ve scheduled periodic breaks from assignments and commissions to create spec projects for theatre and film purely for joy, just to keep myself fresh. Often, those ventures become the most lucrative, but they’re also the most arduous. Also those once-or-twice a year artistic playpens only tap the sap; I have WAY too many ideas to keep ‘em in my pants.

I read m/m and I get M/M. Fundamentally, the genre lets me chip away at something that’s unspoiled escapism, purely for pleasure…. I love feeling free to take risks and get extreme and entertain without worrying about industry politics or producer egos.

Last summer a close friend writing an erotic romance wanted to talk plot bunnies and riff ideas with me. I had just finished a money job that had left me a little dazed; I plot very quickly and outline ditto, so we fell to chatting daily to bash through her structure making sure there weren’t any holes or traps. Well one day, about a week into our plot-wrangling and trying to solve the gaps in her book, she started scolding me and calling me all sorts of names. She said writing a romance would bring my mojo back pronto and claimed the stuff I’d brainstormed off the cuff was fresher and sexier than books she was reading… at which point she proclaimed me “a lazy idiot” if I didn’t sit down and write my own M/M novel, just for fun.

She bet me I could do it in three months; it wound up taking me about six weeks, and it did kickstart my mojo. And then I was hooked!

Anyways….

When and why did you decide on writing as a career?

I’d been working as an actor/singer/dancer since I was about seven and in my late teens, I’d only written jokes for a couple producers in the States, silly 11th hour polish stuff and patter for award shows.

After living in New York for college and a bit after, my then–boyfriend moved to Austria and I got myself hired for a production in London to be closer. On the sly, my wily UK agent sent out a festival short I’d written as a lark. As he predicted, the theatre dug my voice and consequently paid me to write a full-length play for immediate production… aka total lucky break and crack for my Muse. The script I wrote for them was extremely successful and I had to write another; I realized I had all these other stories to tell.

I never looked back. As it turned out, I’d unwittingly trained as a writer/director over the first 20 years of my life by doing a lot of “great works” in rep. As in: anything Shakespeare and Marivaux can’t teach you about stories isn’t worth knowing.

The thing is, if you distil all of my talents, all of my habits, all of my strengths into a single action, what I do across every area of my life is articulate things. I grew up in a fiercely verbal family reading 1200 words a minute. I spent years dissecting other people’s words and trying to make sense of them to audiences. I read constantly, write constantly, talk constantly. And every job I do, writing, directing, producing, even performing (when I still did)… was about finding the way to connect my mind to someone else’s mind to express an idea. I’m always trying to make the synaptic leap that separates people from each other. Actually that’s probably why M/M has been such a blessing; it is an entire genre about connection!

I read your bio which made me wish I had known you a lot earlier when it seemed you had so much fun. You have been a model, a messenger, a promoter, a programmer, a sculptor, a singer, a stripper, a bookkeeper, a bartender, a techie, a teacher, a director… Is there anything you haven’t done? Are there photos of you as a stripper? If so, can I have a few for my “art collection”? (That’s what I call the Friday Guys.) 😆

I wouldn’t trade places with anyone. Even now I still have a helluva lot of fun, but back in my salad days I took no prisoners. My mom raised me to live hard, love hard, work hard, play hard. There are plenty of things I haven’t done, but most of them are things I didn’t want to do: like, I dunno… banking, retail or restaurant work, serious team sports, elective surgery, or sex with Republicans. 🙂

There are photos of my unclothed corpus, and even video of me dancing back in the day. For several years, whenever CNN did a spot on NYC debauchery, they used footage of me in latex hotpants and harness boots whipping my goods around in a suspended chrome cage. I didn’t even know I’d been filmed, but since I was an employee of the club, my release was on file. A friend saw it one night and called me laughing so hard the words didn’t sound like English. So I got to be CNN’s archetypal go-go-gay for a blip in time… Hurrah!

Also, I did racy body modeling through college, and those images still crop up on blogs now and then, though I’m but a shorn, bearded shadow of my dishy younger self. LOL I don’t think anyone needs to see those, if they haven’t already….

Tell us briefly (if that’s possible) 🙂 about your love for Gordon Merrick. I hope I’m not opening the stable door here Damon.  😆

Gordon Merrick is the patron saint of M/M! If you’ve seen my deranged paean to the man over on my website you have a sense of my fervor, but let me do the soundbite version. I stumbled over The Lord Won’t Mind by accident back in the early 80s when I was about 13. On a shelf in a Texas mall, I found a mass-market gay romance that spent SIXTEEN weeks on the NY Times bestseller list?! Feel that fact. Until that moment, all the gay fiction I’d read was pretty sombre and/or pornographic. My mom had loads of post-Stonewall queer lit at home, hell, she knew a lot of the authors, but in 1983-or-4 positive LGBT fiction simply wasn’t exactly thick on the ground. Plus, Merrick had lived this insane, glamorous, openly gay life as a jetsetting blueblood, actor, and (!?!) spy.

Merrick’s books offered totally demented guilty pleasure written by and for and with a ferocious, unapologetic queer aesthetic. They were pulpy trash, yes, but also deliriously romantic and erotic and entertaining. Looking back at them now, I see their prejudices and shortcomings, but they seem like a pivotal moment for popular Gay Fiction. Yet Merrick remains largely ignored, because (like gay pulps, which I also adore) the books weren’t “serious” literature, but erotic escapism. Typical anti-romance, bourgie bullshit, if you ask me. And you did ask…. LOL

What was the genesis of Hot Head? HotHead>

Well, my best galpal in the world went through a stretch of about 7 years dating only tortured, firefighting sex-addicts (seriously) in these doomed operatic love affairs with roses and screaming. During that time, I sat drinking with a lot of FDNY members, listening to crazy confessions as they tried to win my friend with their suffering. So one night, I’m at my summer house drinking whiskey on the porch with this doe-eyed meathead with a neck the size of my thigh. It’s late and my friend is asleep, so it’s just the two of us, laughing a lot, recounting blind dates and vile sex stories.  He starts complimenting gay guys from his gym, a lesbian doctor from Cobble Hill who’s so smart, and I can tell he’s trying to be sensitive and hip and “down with the homos” which is friendly enough… He wanted to let me know he felt comfortable and happy hanging out with me, I guess. Nice.

Out of nowhere, he gets serious and quiet for a while… After a few minutes, he blurts out that he was once in love with a guy … even though he’d been married, one time he’d loved a man that way: his best friend who worked at a different firehouse. Both of them adamantly hetero, sharing hookers at the same time and puking on each other down the Jersey Shore. He couldn’t explain why or how, but he’d realized he had romantic and sexual feelings he’d never confess.

And then his buddy died in 2001 at the World Trade Center. They’d both worked the scene, but only this man had come out alive. I’ll never as long as I live forget the look on his face telling me this horrible story… the pain and disappointment he still carried, and the longing for his friend. An ocean of patient suffering sloshed around inside him and this terrible, impossible secret he could never share with anyone he knew. And that’s where Hot Head came from: unspoken love, unlikely lovers, and a happy ending written the way it should have been.

This is what the blurb says:

Since 9/11, Brooklyn firefighter Griff Muir has wrestled with impossible feelings for his best friend and partner at Ladder 181, Dante Anastagio. Unfortunately, Dante is strictly a ladies’ man, and the FDNY isn’t exactly gay-friendly.

For ten years, Griff has hidden his heart in a half-life of public heroics and private anguish. Griff’s caution and Dante’s cockiness make them an unbeatable team. To protect his buddy, there’s nothing Griff wouldn’t do… until a nearly bankrupt Dante proposes the worst possible solution: HotHead.com, a gay porn website where uniformed hunks get down and dirty. And Dante wants them to appear there—together. Griff may have to guard his heart and live out his darkest fantasies on camera.

Can he rescue the man he loves without wrecking their careers, their families, or their friendship?

You mentioned on your site that Hot Head is the first book in the “Head” series about blue collar men finding unexpected love in NYC. Have you started the next book in the series and if so, when do you expect it to be released?

Indeed! The next book in the series is Hard Head, which focuses on a self-destructive paramedic who’s a secondary character from the first book who practically assaulted me with a book idea of his own. That actually might be finished as soon as July, but I just got hired to write a musical (yes, really!) and that’s been eating up a lot of my extra M/M hours.

Before I really get cranking on Hard Head, I have a crazy steampunk novel which I’ve got about halfway completed… very different from the “Head” books, more baroque and whimsical and crazy filthy-kinky. Hoo-boy! It’s set in the Gilded Age in New York and eminently skullduggerous! I really dig splashing around in the research and the language so it’s been a treat to draft. Still, if all goes the way it has been, I’d say Hard Head could get out to the world by the winter solstice. Heaven willing and the creek don’t rise.

And then comes Bone Head and Block Head and more steampunk and …. 🙂

Since you have been writing for a couple of decades what, in your opinion, is the most enjoyable part of what is basically a solitary occupation?  What’s the worst?

For me, the best thing in any writing is the moment of empathy… when you realize that the work resonated, that someone GOT it, that for even an instant another living soul saw through your eyes or shared your heartbeat or busted out laughing with you on the other side of the world. That spark, linking two lives is so powerful and visceral. That physical resonance characterizes romance in many ways, because romance WANTS you to cry, wants you to gasp, wants your heart to thump and your no-no places to moisten. Another reason M/M has been such a joy for me. It’s a very physical genre and at the best of times wrings physical reactions from its readers. I love the spark of minds rubbing together.

The worst thing about writing? The waiting. I’m so impatient that the idea of sitting around while the world moves like winter molasses makes me want to rampage through the streets with a machete. I don’t need instant gratification certainly, but people can move so slowly. Sometimes, you finish a piece and you want it OUT where people can get at it, but the reality of the business makes that impossible. Hey! Writing is weird. I don’t mind the pressure. I don’t mind the solitude. I don’t mind skipping meals and sleep to get it all down. This late in the game, I don’t even mind the rejection. But waiting and waiting for something you made and loved to see the light of day can be brutal. As my agent says, “You don’t have to love the process, but you have to live with it.” That’s another blessing of M/M: things move so much swifter in this e-publishing neck of the woods.

You may not know this but we have a few boyz who lay around in the hot tub all day on the site and they love to interview authors, especially guys. They have two questions for you:

Ask away; I was born in hot water, and get into it often. 🙂

Boxers, briefs or commando?

Briefs.
I like a soft, snug fit, generally. 🙂 With boxers, I’m always sitting on my junk and racking myself. Commando, the friction and sweat drives me crazy and I’m always tenting in front of the wrong person… I often wear kilts in hot weather for comfort, and going commando-while-kilted is a matter of principle…. That said, for GayRomLit I’m already thinking I may have to cocksock it under the pleats or I’ll end up shackled and pregnant in the Marigny.Otherwise I’m practically a nudist when I’m working (naked now actually!) (Did I really need that visual Damon? Oh Gawd!!!!) whether in my loft or at my summer house. So if I’m commando, I’m pretty much birthday-suiting it. But for undergear: briefs.

Can they visit you and your husband and sample some of your….. ummm…. charms? (I would be very careful how I respond to them). 🙂

Hot meat in speedos is always welcome, but we’ve been monogamous for ten years. LOL We’re one of those couples who knew instantly, finish each other’s sentences, yadda-yadda. On the other hand, I’m a ruthless flirt and get pretty extreme on the dancefloor. If you think the boyz could bust a nut from public frottage, I wouldn’t send them back blue-balled to your Jacuzzi. lol

Last, yes I’m almost done, what does Damon do for fun?

A ton of reading. Flirting. Conversation. My weekly two-stepping excursion. Long dinners with close friends and spicy food. Prowling bookstores to add to my library. Bad movie marathons with the gang over (I’m a passionate collector of rotten cinema). Cold weather vacations, even skiing, when I can sneak away. Quiet times and loud times with my beautiful boyfriend! Working hard at things that matter to me. Living out loud. (I would never have guessed that last part Damon. Who knew? !!! lol)

Thank you for the time Damon.

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Damon is donating a swag pack of goodies including bookmarks, magnets and a personalized signed bookplate to one lucky commenter.

Damon Suede’s Contact Information

email: Damon@damonsuede.com
website: www.DamonSuede.com
Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/damonsuede
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/damon.suede
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Damon-Suede/118289681583504

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72 comments

  • Damon, that was a real treat to read – I could actually feel your personality leaping off the screen, and that doesn’t come across very often in interviews! Looking forward to reading Hot Head, it sounds awesome 😀

    Fantastic interview Wave!

    • Leslie
      It was a real treat to interview Damon as you can well imagine. I’m still giggling at a lot of what he said. 🙂 For some visuals I have to bleach my eyeballs. lol

  • So much fun 🙂 Thank you for letting us get to know you a little better Damon and Wave thank you for the interview, cannot wait to read your book myself.

  • Wow, what an awesome interview and what an impressive personality is shining through those words! The story about that lonely firefighter was deeply moving. It’s comforting to know a person like him is going to find his peace of mind, even if it’s “only” fictionally, in Hot Head. Can’t wait to read it!

  • Thank you for the interview, it was great to get to know DS better 😎
    Looking foward to Hot Head and the rest of the Head series 😀

  • Wow, that’s one impressive bio.
    I’m joining the ranks of everyone here who’s looking forward to Hot Head coming out. Even more so after reading this interview and reading the story behind the book. Also, hearing there’s an entire series in the works is just an added plus.
    Thanks for the interview 🙂

  • Such a great interview to read. The story that inspired Hot Head was very impressive, I’m happy the book will get a happy ending 🙂 I love that it will be a series! I really like it when secondary characters get their own story!

  • when you realize that the work resonated, that someone GOT it, that for even an instant another living soul saw through your eyes or shared your heartbeat or busted out laughing with you on the other side of the world.

    Yes, this. That’s exactly what we’re here for. There are certainly easier ways to make money — and much more money — but that connection is something much more rare.

    Angie

    • :kiss: LOLOLOL

      Nah. Hudson Valley… It’s like the sweet spot for me because it’s only 90 minutes from the city, the countryside is so beautiful, and yet there are so many universities up there there are bookstores and healthfood, even a well-stocked occult shop. Gay friendly, but not a “scene” which keeps me from being tempted away from my keyboard.

      As for my Juice… :blush:

      • How lovely that must be! I’ve always been transported by Hudson River School paintings — just get lost in ’em, no matter how romanticized they are.

        I wouldn’t dream of appropriating THAT juice, even if I stood a chance of doing so. 😀

        Congratulations on the imminent, much-anticipated, and perfectly-timed release of Hot Head! :hurrah: (Jeez, if ever a group of emoticons needed Ritalin, these do.)

    • KZ
      I just want the nekkid picture. 😀
      I don’t know anyone who has a summer house and I don’t care where it is, I want an engraved invitation. 😎

      • I don’t know if I could take more such pictures, Wave, after having seen Rick Reed in all his close-to-Glory. Gay-author cheesecake makes me grumpy. You know the saying: “All the good ones are either…”

        (I can’t even bring myself to finish the sentence.) 😥

        • You can admire man flesh without wanting to jump his bones KZ. I have learned to control myself, unlike you. 🙂 I can truthfully say that I have a few naked pictures of authors that are in my safety deposit box and I take them out occasionally when I want a lift. As for RR, I have the real photo without the hand covering his parts.

          One author whose photo I have is really hot. Sorry I can’t share because he made me sign in blood. 😯

  • !!! Thank you so much!

    I always feel like such an aggressive psycho with interviews, so I’m glad y’all dug it. Wave went above and beyond with those questions too… LOL 😉

    If y’all have any questions at all, ask away!

  • Great interview Wave. I’ve been looking forward to Hot Head being released for quite a while now and it was so interesting to read about the inspiration for this story.

  • Interesting article. I take issue with the blanket statement about television though. As with any medium, there’s great, good, and rotten. The same argument is often made about romance writing– it’s not “worthwhile.” There I disagree, too, naturally.

    • It’s not that I think television is bad for everyone, but I do think it’s bad for writers.

      We feed our heads with words and time spent with television is time spent where someone else does the visualizing for you, exercising a VERY small vocabulary and very narrow set of narrative tropes . Just part of the economics of the medium. When I get hired on a screenwrriting job I can always tell if the writer watches a lot of tv because it does stuff to your imagination and articulation. It becomes the worm Ourobouros, as writers cannibalize other writers who only watch TV until there’s this collapsing feedback loop of ideas.

      Believe me when I say I think about this CONSTANTLY because I work in TV as well, and the research about it is kinda depressing, both for viewers and creators. Television has done irreparable things to our ability to imagine things. Cable has freedoms that network does not, but only small ones.

      Romance fiction by definition involves words in a way that television does not. And television by definition has a very rigid vocabulary afforded it. EVen cable has surprising limitations. The thing is, network tv must hold your attention because selling viewers to companies is how they make their money. ROmance must hold your attention in a very different way.

      As I say, it’s a personal bugbear…. my main issue is what it’s doing to our stories. OUr storytellers have been transmuted by it for good or ill, and not always conscious of that change. Our grasp of language as a culture is diminishing. I just believe that having things imagined FOR you does bad stuff to creative people and affects their output in drastic ways.

  • Great interview! Damon, I’m really looking forward to your book coming out this week. You are definitely the type of person that I wish there was more of around. Have a great day! Thanks Wave for introducing us to another gem!

  • What a pleasure to read about someone who’s large and in charge. I just wish I had soupcon of your energy and your vast array of plot bunnies!

    Thanks so much!

  • Was expecting a By Rote interview & it was anything but !Mr. Suede has different shades, which is very refreshing ! Makes me both happy to know you & even more impressed ! 😉

  • great interview. I also liked Brian on QaF. I also liked Emmett a lot as well, though it’s been a while since we’ve watched the show. Looking forward to reading Hot Head. If it’s anything like the interview it will be a great ride.

    And like Wave, I want to see the nekkid picture. 🙂 I promise I won’t share it except with my husband.

  • I actually read Damon’s one star review and I can say to that author: Be careful what you wish for! 😀

    The origin of Hot Head is heartbreaking. I’m glad Damon decided to give those men a happy ending, even if only fictional. I’m looking forward to reading it.

    The best interviews always give you the glimpse of the real person behind the words. This was one of them. Well done, Wave & Damon! 🙂

  • Thank-you Wave and Damon, what a great interview!

    It’s great to know that I’m not the only one that thought Brian Kinney was the only “normal” character on QAF, I totally miss that character.

    I can’t believe all the things you have done in your life, very cool and interesting, I love reading about it….please thanks your mom for me!

    I can’t wait to read Hot Head! :reading1:

  • Wonderful interview !
    Thank you Damon for being such a whirlwind (and literate too!!)
    Looking forward to Hot Head – and the rest!
    Thank you Wave, too, for such clever questions 😀

  • Aww, a refreshing and lively interview! Just what I needed to jumpstart this hot, hazy Monday monday. (I don’t do mornings).

    Its interesting to me how many authors and writers say they never intended to write a series, but the secondary characters beat them over the head with their own story and demand it be written.

    Really looking for to ready Hot Head.

    • I couldn’t help myself, Hope. the world of this book just took over my imagination.

      Even now it tugs at me all the time, and the other guys want to get down the the business of finding what they need… 😀

      • I hope you plan to include Dante and Griff in the follow up stories. I’d love to know what their happy ending entails.

  • Wave, thank you for a great interview. Damon, you had me crying and laughing already, I can’t wait for the book.

  • Great interview Damon. With all the things you’ve done, I don’t think you’ll need a bucket list at the end.

    The story of the firefighter sounds very inspiring. I’m looking forward to reading your book Hot Head.

  • Astonishing biography and having read the Dreamspinner extract I’m betting the house on a fabulous book. Thanks for sharing.

  • So I was already planning to get HOT HEAD because of the firemen {whoo!}, but after reading And that’s where Hot Head came from: unspoken love, unlikely lovers, and a happy ending written the way it should have been. I am so getting it and telling everyone I know about it. {sniffle} You’re already one of my favorites, Damon!

  • First of all, finally a picture that looks like you! (the tuxedo one) I met you before I saw any pictures of you and all the pictures that followed just didn’t look like the Damon I’d met…
    Secondly, I can’t wait to read your novel. When I read your interviews or blogs, I can hear you speak (yes, everyone, he is that manic and that intense) and I hope to hear your voice in this too! 😀
    In NYC I promised to pick your brain about the screen writing, but haven’t gotten round to it. I’m so not like you (terminal procrastinator that I am) 😕

    • LOL Thank you Z.

      I tend to take terrible pictures because I move too fast. Whenever you’re ready, my brain is ready for picking! 😀 :yes:

  • Damon really is wonderful! I needed a beta reader, Damon volunteered, and in something like 2 hours I had an email from him with a NYC phone number and a note to call him. Breath held and expecting the worst, I called and spent the next half-hour or so listening to him talk so fast I had to write down only keywords or I would’ve missed everything. Then he let me have the file with all his written comments! He’s intense and brilliant. I’m still working on that story, Damon, and am still grateful for your input.

    • :blove2: You’re so sweet to say so… In fact, I think that may have been about 3 days after I joined the Rainbow Romance Writers, so it was a perfect way to “meet” you too, Missy. I can’t wait to read the finished product! I’m having a total sci-fi frenzy at the moment.

      I blame it on the goodreads M/M group’s july anthology. The letter I picked (from Nene) kickstarted all kinds of feeeelthy futuristic craziness. :sex2:

  • Wow! What energy, and what a fun interview! I’m can’t wait for Hot Head ’cause I love me some sexy firemen, and the whole ‘friends become lovers’ thing appeals to me in a big way. But my heart aches for the man who confessed his loss to you.

    I look forward to meeting you in New Orleans in October.

  • Awesome interview, so ready to read Hot Head, and to know how it was inspired, sweet. I’m curious as to whether or not the actually fire man knows that he inspired you to write this book and will he be receiving a copy?
    I am super excited for New Orleans, I be looking forward to meeting you, lurking in dark corners to get a naked pic too. Don’t go to the light! LOL :afraid:

  • Damon, great interview. Now we definitely know a lot more about you! 😉

    Your book (and the series) sounds great!

  • I haven’t read anything by Damon yet. I’m going to fix that problem! If Damon’s personality comes out in the books, then I am in for a real treat!

  • I’m very much looking forward to Hot Head–but I love the way your inspiration process works. When something TRULY moves us, connects us to the human race, it seems that fiction is the best way to express that–it’s why imaginative literature is so very important. (I love television by the way– but only the fiction. Reality television seems like such a corrosive humanity oxidant, and we just deteriorate more rapidly in the wake of it.)

    I adore the description of your super-charged lawn-mower personality–get out there, Damon, and sculpt the world landscape that comes under your sharpened wit!

  • Wow, exciting interview! A great pick-me-up after a long exhausting work day, thanks! Hot Head sounds fabulous, as do the other ones, especially Bone Head :grin:. I’m looking forward to watching you in New Orleans, particularly looking forward to some of the extreme dancing, definitely going to bring the video camera 😀 😀 😀

    • Oh, don’t worry, Angel… JAR HEAD is already thrumming there in the wings, I promise! I have a list of heads if people are actually interested… :whistle: Let’s just see how the first outing goes. LOL

  • What a remarkably self-effacing and honest interview. I truly look forward to learning more about you via your novels. Best wishes to you as you embark on this new pathway in your career.

    I think it was Emerson who wrote a particularly sweet line in his comment on success–I am excerpting from a larger verse so please forgive–but as I recall it Emerson says:

    To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived;
    This is to have succeeded.

    I think this book of yours and your discussion with the man who lost a love to the tragedy of 9/11 qualifies nicely as a time when you have made it possible for one life to breathe a little easier and healing to take place.

    Thank you for sharing that moment with us.

    respectfully,

    Sammy

  • Great interview Damon! Can’t wait to read Hot Head. I live across the street from a NYC firehouse and keep waiting for these gorgeous guys to start making out… unfortunately all they seem to do is fight fires. Shucks!

    :whistle:

  • Damon/Wave,
    I agree with the others..I felt your intensity in this interview.. You know they have medication to bring it down a notch? Great interview, Im looking forward to your book, I’ll be taking it with me on a road trip this weekend. I will need something to take my mind off my husband’s driving, it will be your book or Benadryl.

  • First you say you’re like Brian McKinney and I get all excited because that means you’re a slut and then you say you’re monogamous. There goes my dream of New Orleans.
    Trust me, I will be looking under a kilt and maybe with a camera! 😯

  • That is a fantastic interview. Entertaining and more. I’m struck by the experience that inspired Hot Heads, and the fact that you took something that raw and made it a book, fiction, a romance. I haven’t read it yet, but I’m pretty sure I’ll find out you did it very well. So, an inspiring interview, but really fun, too. Thanks.

    • Lou, I feel like those small, vulnerable moments always make the best seeds for projects because the power is so compressed and exposed.

      In a weird way everything I’ve ever written comes from a germ like that, some stinging bit of grit that irritates my imaginatioin and that I can’t spit out of my shell or ignore… And so I just have to lick and lick and slobber and lick like a good mollusk until it’s a pearl, so it can live in my mind and heart without driving me MAD.. :sceptic: :nuts:

  • Great interview, Wave and Damon! I loved the blurb for Hot Head and was already planning on purchasing it, but hearing the story for what inspired it,…I can’t even imagine that kind of pain…now I really can’t wait to read the HEA those two men never had!

  • Damon/Wave
    Thanks for an amazing interview!
    Damon, You are ABSOLUTELY GORGEOUS inside and out!
    “For me, the best thing in any writing is the moment of empathy… when you realize that the work resonated, that someone GOT it, that for even an instant another living soul saw through your eyes or shared your heartbeat or busted out laughing with you on the other side of the world. That spark, linking two lives is so powerful and visceral.”

    With this interview you accomplished EXACTLY that! 🙂
    VERY much looking forward to Hot Head.
    Can’t wait to get back inside your “head/s”. :delic:
    Cheers!

  • Fun interview, except for the part about the inspiration for Hot Heads — that about broke my heart. The information about your choice of undergarments (or lack thereof) cheered me up, though. 🙂

    Congratulations on the book! It sounds like a great read.

  • A simply brilliant interview,this is probably one of the most personal and instructive interview I have ever read.Can’t wait to get your book,I’m checking the mail everyday.Looking forward to NOLA.

    • Thank you so much, Arlene!

      Wave and I really had a kickass time doing it and she turned it LOOSE on me with the questions! :happydance: Add chocolate and seedy anecodotes and we were bound to get batty up in here! :jump:

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