BLOG TOUR with REVIEW, EXCERPT, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, and GIVEAWAY: ‘Conning Colin’ by Brad Vance and El
Title: Conning Colin
Author: Brad Vance and Elsa Winters
Published: June 1, 2017
Publisher: Self-Published/Zirconia Publishing, Inc.
Genre: Contemporary Romance; Erotic Romance
Length: 454 Pages
Tags: Gay; M/M; Escort/Rent Boy; HEA
About Conning Colin
Hamilton Dillon is a high class Manhattan escort, polished, well dressed, and cultured. Colin O’Neill is recently divorced, questioning his sexuality, and disappointed by his first fumbling gay hookups. So he figures, why not hire the best of the best to show him the ropes?
What he doesn’t know is that Hamilton Dillon is really Henry Davis, yet another New Yorker living on the financial edge, cobbling together several jobs to make a living. “Hamilton” has one great suit he can wear on an overnight date, but Henry’s got a good friend at GQ who makes a nice side income renting designer men’s wear for weddings, job interviews, and oh yeah, high end escorts on long weekend assignments. The “top agency” that represents “Hamilton” is really just a smartass lady in India with a Skype account, whose face Henry’s never seen. Oh, and Henry’s also the gruff and very unpolished New York Straight Man “Dillinger,” a solo porn star.
In other words, he’s not at all who Colin thinks he is. Which is just fine, until their relationship gets… complicated.
Today, IndiGo Marketing and Design brings you an interview with Brad Vance, author of Conning Colin. Tell us a little about yourself and your current book.
How did you come up with the title of your book or series?
I was a ways into the book before it came to me. I realized that in their own ways, both of my MCs were “con men.” Henry Davis masquerades as Harrison Dillon, glamorous high end escort in expensive suits, an expert on wine and fine dining, and on a porn site as “Dillinger,” a gritty working class straight dude who’ll jerk off on cam for gay dudes if the money’s right… but really he’s just a guy who likes to sit on the couch with a pint of ice cream dripping onto his old Mets t-shirt, watching Netflix. He’s got a dresser full of t shirts and shorts, two pairs of tennis shoes, and one suit to his name. And Colin O’Neill is an actor, a shy and awkward guy who, when he goes into his voiceover booth, becomes a different person, brazen, confident, cocky. Both of them are conning the world, and themselves, but Colin falls in love with “Harrison Dillon,” a man who doesn’t exist, and he’s a character Henry has to maintain for… well, you’ll see when you read the book. So however he feels about Colin, he has to keep up the con.
What do you think makes a good story?
Research, realism, believability. Dialogue that sounds like something actual men would say to each other. If you make the guy a cop, pick up a textbook on policing or a cop memoir and see what the job is really like. If you make the guy a soldier, make sure you know the job he has, the lingo, etc. We all have these fantasy men (fireman, cop, etc.) but to me, what fulfills the fantasy is that sense that this guy really is what you say he is? Don’t write that the MC is a football player and then, you know, never mention football again in the whole book.
What book are you reading now?
I’m doing research for my WIP, a novel about a shy film historian who discovers the existence of a long-lost “gay film,” made in secret in the 1930s under the noses of arch conservative studio heads, using resources they snuck away with during the making of a massive DeMille-style Biblical epic. But to track down the film, he has to team up with a bad boy actor/director/writer, a young dude straight out of YouTube with little knowledge or regard for the “old stuff.” So I’m reading William J. Mann’s books on old gay Hollywood, and rereading the classics like An Empire of Their Own and Hollywood Babylon to recapture the sense of that era. I love old Hollywood, and the secret gay world within it, so the research is really fun for me.
Compare yourself to your main character.
Well, I’m not as good looking as Henry, or Colin! But I know what it’s like to cobble together a living from a bunch of gigs, to be an audiobook narrator when I wake up (before the birds and cars and planes and people get going), to be a writer after breakfast, and an editor of other people’s work in the afternoons. It’s the price that Henry, and I, pay for our freedom from the drudgery of life on someone else’s clock.
What for you is the perfect book hero?
Well, he’s smart, very talented at whatever it is he does, has a dark sense of humor, can hold his own in a fight, is extremely great at sex and knows it’s an art form, has a dark side either born in him or made in him by events, never gives up in a crisis, hates being bored, and is looking for a partner who can hold his own in every one of these arenas. Now that I put that on paper, I think it pretty much describes most every character I’ve ever written!
Colin O’Neill hung up the phone, dizzy with excitement and fear. He’d done it. He’d called the number, talked to the agency, and booked a “date” with Hamilton Dillon.
He’d looked at Hamilton’s Rentmen.com ad a hundred times, at least, over the last three months. He’d looked forward to new profile photos the way a kid keeps an ear cocked for the ice cream truck. Even though all the profile pictures had been beheaded for discretion, it didn’t matter. Hamilton Dillon had a way of posing that expressed more personality with his body than most other guys ever did with their faces.
The way he sat on a park bench in nothing but a pair of running shorts and Nikes, shirtless, manspread, his arms thrown over the back of the bench, his strong graceful neck taut, telling you that the face just out of frame was tilted up towards the Central Park sunshine, that the man was reveling in his easy beauty, the unique joy that comes from being young and hot and free in New York City…
Then the way he floated in the air in those same shorts and Nikes, leaping for a football, the camera capturing him from behind in the moment the ball touched his fingers, the imminence of his success apparent, ordained, the muscles in his back bunched, the mass of his shoulders gathered together, sweat flying off his brown hair, in the seconds before you knew he landed on the lawn, arms curled around the ball, surely to rise in triumph and be slapped on the back by all his equally hot and shirtless buddies…
The way he sat at a café table, in a slim fit navy blue polo shirt, one of his sculpted vascular arms holding open a well-worn copy of The Fortress of Solitude and the other just toying with a cup of espresso as if it was the back of another man’s hand…
Colin often did something that very few men did anymore, which was to masturbate furiously and successfully to a series of still photos. And with no penises in sight, to boot. He’d done it so often over the last three months that he’d stopped donating his old t-shirts, because he needed them for cleanup duty, at least until they became hopelessly stained.
He had been divorced for six months now, amicably, from a wife who’d pretty much always known he was gay but had decided to let him figure it out for himself. Elspeth was a career woman whose need for a husband was seasonal, from the company picnic in July to the company Christmas party in December, with various client dinners in between.
He was twenty seven years old, and had engaged in sexual intercourse with one woman and two men. Intercourse was pretty much the word for it, he thought. It sounded less like passion and more like, well, cars merging on the freeway, and all three partners had been just about that exciting. (Actually less so, since on the freeway there was always the thrilling risk of death at the hands of someone who’d rather kill you than let you merge.)
Then one night, half drunk and inhibitions lowered, he’d thought, Fuck it, let’s hire a professional and see how it feels when it’s done right.
He’d paged through the escort ads on Rentmen, hundreds of them in Manhattan alone. It was mind numbing, the diversity, and it was overwhelming, the number of choices. He knew he didn’t want to visit Master Bob in his safe and private play space, and he knew he didn’t want to party with Anaconda Joe. The ones who caught his eye were, well yeah, the ones who looked… classy. The one thing he knew he didn’t want was to get ripped off.
And he didn’t want it to feel... He didn’t want to feel like he’d got a burger in a fast food drive through. He wanted it to be special, if that was really possible with a paid companion and not just something that happened to teenage boys in Hollywood movies.
But even the upscale-looking ones, well, there was something about them that… He knew it was good business, to offer yourself up as “versatile,” and available for “mild to wild,” but… Well, the more he saw what he didn’t want, the more a picture began to form in his mind of what he did want. He didn’t want someone who looked like an investment banker but whose profile also said, “Hey I look classy but I can drop it if you just want a dirty pig fest and you’ve got the money for it.”
No. He wanted someone who was one thing. Who wasn’t whoever you wanted him to be. But who was what he said he was. Classy, for real. Not “up for anything.”
And then he found Harrison Dillon.
Amazon/KU
Tour Schedule
6/5 - Bookslaidbareboys
6/6 - Book Lovers 4Ever
6/7 - Sharing Links and Wisdom
6/7 - Love Bytes
6/8 - Erotica For All
6/9 - My Fiction Nook
6/12 - Divine Magazine
6/13 - MM Book Escape
6/14 - V's Reads
6/15 - Kimmers' Erotic Book Banter
6/15 - Bayou Book Junkie
6/15 - Happily Ever Chapter
6/16 - MM Good Book Reviews
Meet the Author
I’m Brad Vance, and I write romance, erotica and science fiction (as Adam Vance). I’m also available for editorial work. You can read more about my services here!
I’m also the narrator of my own audiobooks, A Little Too Broken, Given the Circumstances, and Apollo’s Curse, with more of my back list to come!
You can find them here at Audible and iTunes, as well as other fine retailers including Audiobooks.com, Hoopla, Findaway and more!
For more from Brad be sure and visit his website.
Meet the Author
(Also Writes as Lola Carson)
Hi! I'm Elsa Winters! I just graduated college and am ready for whatever the world has to throw at me! I'm currently working as a bartender in Seattle but I hope I'm able to make something of this writing thing.
For more from Elsa/Lola be sure and visit their website.
