Catalysts Blog Tour – Gay Romance Org

Blurb

Sometimes all it takes is meeting one person to turn your world upside down. Will Derrie likes girls but he isn’t honest with them; he wants kinky sex and lots of it. When Hugh offers to dominate him, no sex required, Will realizes it might not be so easy to separate the two.

Sometimes all it takes is a new angle on an old idea to change everything you thought you wanted. Hugh Reynolds holds the world at arm’s length. He lives alone, works alone, and he thinks he’s as happy as he’ll ever be. But Will gets under his skin and once he’s gone, Hugh realizes he doesn’t want to go it alone forever.

Sometimes all it takes is a random encounter to open your mind (and your heart). Truman Jennings hits on a cute guy at a conference and he’s smitten by the end of their first date. Hugh’s not the kindest or the easiest boyfriend Truman’s ever had, but he brings one thing to their relationship that no one else could: kinky, adventurous, sweetly submissive Will.

Sometimes you can’t find the right man till you find the wrong one. Three men. Three sides to love, and intimacy, and laughter. Three people who didn’t know what they were looking for…until they found it in each other.

On Catalysts: Author Guest Post

Some books demand to be written.

I first encountered the book that would eventually be Catalysts on a doorstep. Rather, I encountered Will Derrie standing on a doorstep in my mind’s eye, having just knocked, caught nervously in the pause between knocking and being greeted.

Why was this guy so nervous? Whose house was it? If he was so damn nervous, why didn’t he just leave? He was sweating, I could practically feel it, and his stomach was rolling.

The door opened to reveal a man who was…nothing like Will expected.

Short, with glasses, in casual clothes. Guarded eyes; tight, but friendly, smile.

Hugh Reynolds. I knew his name immediately. I’m terrible with character names. I scour liner notes and the acknowledgements of favorite books, trying to come up with new names, playing with letter replacements until it’s less like I’m copying the name of some guitarist’s girlfriend, or the beloved brother of a mystery writer.

But Hugh? Oh, Hugh I knew. I knew exactly why he was living in a house surely too big for a single man, I knew he had a library downstairs, and I knew he spoke with a pretentious affectation he’d adopted as a teenage Anglophile and never managed to break. I knew he wore casual clothes to put Will at ease, and that he was more comfortable in a decent pair of tailored slacks.

I still had the question of how these two men, facing one another across a threshold, came to be standing there. And the truth was, I didn’t quite know. I wrote two very different versions of the book and was disgusted with both of them before vowing to abandon the project.

Writing books is a tricky business. I lay my fingers on the keys and words chase each other across the screen, but it’s not all me. As clearly as I knew Hugh’s name, I knew that both of my initial attempts at the book were wrong. Yes, I had the characters (a young man trying to claw his way out of his darkest fantasies, and a slightly older man for whom loneliness had become a close companion), and I had the dynamic between them (dominance, submission, laughter, teasing, affection), but it didn’t work, damn everything.

I tried to forget the book. I tried to escape the hold the characters had on me. But some books demand to be written, and this is one of them.

Usually I can pinpoint the way in to a story, the moment when the puzzle starts to reveal itself. The catalyst, if you will. For me, in this story, it’s that front porch. It’s Will waiting for the door to open, sometimes nervous, sometimes sad, sometimes elated, but always expecting to see some reflection of himself on the face of the person answering. I realized relatively early on that the person Will planned to see wouldn’t always be Hugh, but that his feelings for the men behind that door would only deepen over time.

Catalysts is about the relationships that surprise us, the momentary delight that never fades, and the endless human capacity for intimacy. It is very much about romance taking us on journeys we never would have imagined. And of course, from the first, it’s about love.

About Kris Ripper

Kris Ripper lives in the great state of California and hails from the San Francisco Bay Area. Kris shares a converted garage with a toddler, can do two pull-ups in a row, and can write backwards. (No, really.) Kris is genderqueer and prefers the z-based pronouns because they’re freaking sweet. Ze has been writing fiction since ze learned how to write, and boring zir stuffed animals with stories long before that.