Young billionaires

In my Dominance series, Stephen Dominick is a thirty-year-old billionaire, and of course it goes without saying that he's hot as hell. In Romancelandia, of course, there are gazillions of young, single, handsome billionaires brooding in their offices, just moping behind their desks while they wait for that special guy or gal to wander in and heal their emotional scars with a sweet smile and a few hot sexual encounters. In real life... yeahhhhh, not so much. It's no wonder most of us never stumble across these hot hunky billionaires, because there aren't actually that many of them. According to this Forbes article, there are only a few more than 1400 billionaires in the entire world, and a mere five of those are thirty or younger. Only twenty-three are forty or under, and only nine of those twenty-three are in the United States.

So your chances of running into a youthful, sensual, dominating billionaire who wants to bend you over the desk and have his wicked way with you when you apply for your next job? In Romancelandia, about one in ten (and maybe even better than that if you're sweet, innocent and a little on the clumsy side). In the real world... well, you probably have a much better chance of winning the lottery or of being struck by lightning. Thank God for romance novels!

INNOCENT, Chapter 2

I finally got the second chapter of Innocent up here. Scroll about halfway down the page to read the new material.

A few notes on Teaching Dallas

Glancing through Teaching Dallas today, I noticed a few things worthy of comment:

-There's no such college as Chesapeake State University. In Dominance, I had Gabriel attend a real Norfolk school, Old Dominion University, but since Teaching Dallas revolves around a professor dating a student, I felt it preferable from a legal point of view to use a made-up school name.

-Dallas lives in Whaleyville, Virginia. When most of Suffolk was Nansemond County, Whaleyville was a very small incorporated town. Now it's actually part of Suffolk, and is located in the southern part of the city, near the North Carolina border and close to the Dismal Swamp. It's still mostly farms and trees. There are a lot of great old farmhouses still standing throughout Suffolk, which were the inspiration for the Palmer farmhouse.

-So far no one seems to have noticed my tiny little Doctor Who reference. Adrian wears bow ties and tweed jackets to work, and early in the story I establish that it's because he thinks bow ties are cool.

-I'm planning a sequel called Teaching Adrian. It's a very rough idea in my head right now, but I'm thinking it'll be about Adrian's dismay when he has to teach a literature class on gay erotica, which he (with his highly focused interest in Shakespeare) has very little knowledge of. But Dallas will help him learn all about it!

Of Superbirds

While I was looking over Innocent, I saw I'd made a slight error in the first chapter. I'd originally made Dom's car a ragtop Road Runner, then changed it to a Superbird. I left the word "ragtop" in, however, but alas, the Superbird did not come in a ragtop form. Or so I thought. When I Googled it, I found that someone once modified a Superbird into a convertible, which looked like this. Still, I think a hardcore collector would want as close to the original as he could get. Also, once again he wouldn't actually be driving the thing, as it's worth $200K or so.

Wondering what a Superbird looks like? Here's a picture from Wikipedia showing a Superbird painted "Vitamin C":

Yes, it actually did come from the manufacturer with a decal of the Road Runner holding a helmet. Go figure.

INNOCENT excerpt

As promised, the first chapter of Innocent is up on my website. More tomorrow, I hope!

And that's a wrap on the house

Dad signed the closing papers for his house yesterday, and the other guy signed early this morning. When I drove over today to pick up the last of Dad's stuff, there was already a big-ass crane there, with a crew removing a good many of the trees:

The worst was a big pine tree in the back yard with huge branches overhanging the roof, but the entire back yard was really a jungle. (I looked at it on Google Maps the other day from above, and it looked like a rain forest. You could barely see the house!) The funny thing is that it was an empty field when my parents moved in-- but they planted a lot of trees, and trees can grow really, really big in a half century!

I feel a little sad seeing my childhood home going on to a different family, but it's going to be a nice little house once it's renovated (the buyer was bubbling over with enthusiasm as he showed me the siding and roofing he'd picked out-- he really enjoys making houses come back to life, and it shows). I'm mostly relieved all the selling and the moving is over. I never need make that drive again unless I want to. After making the drive at least twice a week for the past three years, I'm pretty tired of it!

Anyway, I'm finally coming to the point of this post. Yes, I did have a point! I wanted to have Innocent up today, but that's not going to happen. I'm going to dig in and finish it in the next couple of days, and then get Illumination finished too. There will be a long excerpt up for Innocent tomorrow, though. I promise!

That's an interesting nickname

I found my granddad's college yearbook from 1915 online today. The picture is blurry if you try to enlarge it to a decent size (I can get a reprint of the yearbook for a mere $99, but for the time being I think I'll pass on that), but they've kindly typed out the text. It says my granddad's nickname was... Honey-dipper. I don't really want to think about what that might have meant:-P.