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Breakfast Buddies #NewRelease by Ildar Daminov #Giveaway #LGBTQIA+

November 6, 2022 by Adriana Kraft

Title: Breakfast Buddies

Author: Ildar Daminov

Publisher: NineStar Press

Release Date: 11/01/2022

Heat Level: 1 – No Sex

Pairing: Male/Male

Length: 23900

Genre: Contemporary, LGBTQIA+, college students, self-discovery, first love, cultural differences, writing

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Description

We humans are spectacularly bad at understanding our own emotions.

A socially conservative Asian young man makes a life-changing decision—he moves to an international metropolis in the very heart of Europe to start his first year as a student at a prestigious academic institution. During one of the very first breakfasts at his new residence he meets a senior student, Jürgen B., to whom he takes an instant liking. As their friendship progresses, these small breakfast sessions become more and more meaningful to the young man, who starts to question both his own identity and his values as he discovers the depth of his confusing feelings about Jürgen.

His struggles to figure out what Jürgen means to him are made even worse by his fears about opening up, especially to his own family. In his desperation, he turns to the only method at hand—reflecting on his diary records, which he makes every day. That is how his first academic year in Europe becomes an exercise in understanding and accepting himself and his own feelings. As the summer approaches, Jürgen, who is completely oblivious of his friend’s dilemma, is about to graduate and leave the academy for good. In the meantime, his friend is still torn between confessing his feelings and doing what others seeming to want from him.

Excerpt

Breakfast Buddies
Ildar Daminov © 2022
All Rights Reserved

Prologue
August 16, 2019

Sunny

We humans are spectacularly bad at understanding our own emotions.

I rummaged through a pile of books, trying to find it. Where could it be? I thought it had to be somewhere in between these dusty old tomes. Yet my attempts to find it seemed futile, and I got increasingly angry—my short-tempered nature did not help either. I pushed aside a pile of books standing in my way, mumbling in great annoyance. Some of them fell on the floor with loud thumps. After the idea came to me, I simply could not forget about it. I had to find it. There was just no other way. It must have been somewhere among all these heavy monographs on Korean politics, East Asian history, and countless language textbooks—the scholarly legacy of my former studies.

In my hectic search, I accidentally toppled one of the piles and cursed quietly. That was when I saw an old, laminated picture gracefully land on top of the scattered books. It looked familiar, so I picked it up. It was a photo of me and my academy friends—Jean Luc, Aja, Negasi, and… Jürgen. I felt a funny prickle in my heart. The picture made me slightly nostalgic about my student days. Ah, the academy, that international, scholarly melting pot. That was the place where it all started… Then I came back to my senses and shook my head, as if trying to free myself from some magical slumber. I had to concentrate, so I hid the photo in my coat pocket and resumed my search.

Where could it be? I clearly remembered leaving it here after my trip to Seoul, at least I thought I did. As the evening progressed, so did my desperation. I had come all the way back home to retrieve it—all this could not have been in vain! I sneezed. A cloud of dust exploded right in front of me, and I closed my eyes, grunting yet again in a mix of annoyance and desperation. Still, I persisted. After an extra hour of extensive searching that involved tired puffing, desperate muttering, and other forms of noiseless complaints, I finally found the precious object that I had been so obsessively looking for.

There it was. A rather unremarkable battered notebook with a brown leather cover that had almost lost its color. The binding had two numbers engraved on it—2016/2018. Inconspicuous though it looked, there was something mysteriously magical and enticing about it. Why did I need it so badly in the first place? I asked myself. I certainly knew the uncomfortable answer. It was a part of me, a part that I wanted to forget. Its semi-magical importance was reflected in the story that it told—a long-forgotten story of internal struggle, love, cowardice, and personal growth.

I smiled to myself furtively. It had taken a lot of courage to get back home, find it, and embark on a new adventure. So I had to make sure that I did everything properly. After all, diaries are simple but powerful tools: these mighty artifacts of the past that can bring back unnecessary memories and reopen old wounds. A phenomenon truly curious and somewhat egocentric in nature. Why do we even write diaries? We share our hopes and dreams, vent out anger and frustration in their pages. There are people who do not even have a clear aim when they first put pen to paper. There are people who want to organize their thoughts properly. There are people who do not know to whom they could entrust their secrets and so choose a silent paper friend. There are people who like to self-reflect and want to better understand themselves. There are people…

So many people and so many diaries. Some are full of trite details of daily routines, while others diligently guard what our past selves thought to be our dearest and most important memories. Some become deeply cherished heirlooms passed down from generation to generation, while others are consumed by the insatiable quicksand of history, the names of those who wrote them vanishing like the final gentle whisper of the early autumn wind. Yet every diary—no matter how boring or gripping it is—tells a story and creates meaning where there was none. If used wisely, that meaning helps us to better understand this ridiculously complicated world through the stories of ourselves and others.

My furtive smile became brighter as I carefully studied the dusty notebook in my hands. I was full of triumph and determination—and yet felt a tiny droplet of melancholy and wistfulness. As I kept looking at it, I wondered whether I was ready to finish the last entry. Perhaps, this was the right time to revisit the diary and do it.

Purchase

NineStar Press | Books2Read

Meet the Author

Ildar Daminov is a Tatar Kazakhstani social scientist and a modern-day nomad who resides in and travels across Europe. In his free time, he writes short stories in English and Russian and does a podcast on North Korea. If you like this story, you can contact him via his email or on Facebook.

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“Too Hot to Handle” and other titles…#MFRWAuthor

February 24, 2017 by Adriana Kraft

Welcome to Week 8 of the MFRW 52-Week Blog Challenge! This week’s topic is How I Choose a Blog Title.

Sometimes we think book titles choose us. Did you ever try to pick something up off a hot stove and go Wow—that’s too hot to handle? Yeah. That’s the level of heat we hope you think of when you see our upcoming title this July. When Extasy Books proposed their Summer Shorts series, we knew we wanted to write about the swinging mid-life couple who star in our Swinging Games Series. The incident at the stove happened the evening after I saw the announcement – well, and maybe I said some other words, too, but they don’t belong in our title. We’ve had a lot of fun writing Too Hot to Handle. Summers can be brutally hot and humid where our star couple live in Southern Indiana, so we sent them to the Wisconsin north woods to cool off at a nudist resort. Wonder if they’ll meet another couple too hot to handle…

Any little thing in our life can inspire a title or a story. We were driving through Ashland, Wisconsin, headed back home to Minnesota late one spring when we had to stop for a construction van that was double parked unloading supplies. When we took a closer look at the figure in coveralls carrying the materials, we discovered it was a woman. Our son is a general contractor, and at the time he had a female interior painter he relied on for detail work, so our title was easy, and the plot soon followed. The book will be released at Extasy Books March 17.

“Riders Up!” is the call for jockeys to mount and move from the paddock out to the racetrack for the post parade ahead of each horse race. We thought that would work perfectly for our four-book romantic suspense series set in the horse racing industry. The title for Book One was obvious as soon as we had names for our heroine and her horse: “Cassie,” and “Cassie’s Hope.” Once that was in place, we wanted all four books to have a two-word title. We love how our cover artist, Rebecca Poole, created symmetry across the series with the title words.

For this last book, the title definitely created the story. Young virgin seeks out her trusted childhood buddy for some sex tutoring so she can please her fiancé on that special night. Cherry Tune-Up says it all, don’t you think? Wonder who she’ll choose for the next tune-up…

When you’re browsing for books, what grabs you first and makes you look again? It can be a close race between the cover and the title – but for me, the title wins out. Titles are almost certain to have come from the authors, while covers are more likely to have a host of other contributors and decision makers behind them.

Click on the links below to hear about other authors and their titles!

The family said WHAT? #MFRWAuthor

January 13, 2017 by Adriana Kraft

Week 2 of the MFRW year-long blog challenge! Click on the list at the bottom to travel to all participants. This week’s theme? How my family supports my writing.

None of us could do what we do without support, and when family is on our side, we thrive – we can take on the world. For starters, the most important family member in my life – my husband – is my co-author, so we face the world with a solid foundation.

We got a good head start in the families we grew up in. Our parents are gone, but all four of them encouraged creativity and supported unconventional choices, however ill-advised some of those choices might have seemed at the time.

Hubs’ mother was an avid romance reader, especially during the nine years she was a widow after his dad died. As her eyesight worsened, we’d hit our local used book store for a half-dozen large-print romance books every three weeks before making the five hour drive to check in on her for the weekend. She did read (and liked) a couple of our early romantic suspense stories, although she confessed she “skipped over” the sex parts. She would probably not have approved of the erotic direction our writing later took.

Both my parents, on the other hand, probably would have, and I think my dad would even admit to some envy, were he still here. His older sister – my aunt – worked for the Kinsey Institute, so no topic was off limits when she was around. She and he are probably doing fist pumps as they watch us navigate the publishing world with our sexy stories. My mother would probably have kept her approval more hidden (she disapproved of my aunt). But when it came time for me to clean out their last apartment, on the bookshelf hidden behind the clothes in her closet I found a well-read copy of the Kama Sutra, so I know her heart would have been on our side.

We carry their support with us, always.