opposites attract | Alex Gabriel

Very soon — shortly before the year is out — I’ll be publishing a FREE, all-new short story featuring Ryuu and Hiro of Learning How to Lose, in Six Easy Steps. It will include hot sex, unexpected sweetness, roleplaying of the “hooker and john” variety, Ryuu being awkwardly sincere in strange moments, Hiro being surprisingly good at being a fake hooker, and more. (Also, Yo is a troll. But then, we already knew that. *g*)

Walk the Walk is something of a self-indulgence on my part; it’s a slice of life set after the Learning How to Lose trilogy, with a large percentage of hot sex included, and basically, I just wanted to write it. 😉

The story doesn’t have any real spoilers, but it does build on the characters and their relationship and history as established in the earlier books. Personally, I’d recommend reading the previous works in the series first, but hey — go where your reading whims take you!

Learning How to Lose is a Rainbow Awards 2015 Finalist, and an ARe besteller. Here’s the synopsis:

Losing is a thing Japanese pop star Ryuu Shiwasuda does not do — certainly not gracefully. Image is everything to hot-headed Ryuu. Sure, his macho bluster is only a cover for shyness and social awkwardness, but he takes it (and himself) very seriously.

So when gratingly cheerful punster Hiro Takahashi delivers the ultimate insult of letting Ryuu win at a video game, Ryuu is cut to the quick, and vows swift vengeance. Can’t be too hard to beat a dork like Hiro, right?

Wrong. As Ryuu chases after his elusive victory, he’s forced to add more and more items to the list of “things to beat Hiro at” — and is shocked to find that Hiro’s quirky charm is sparking never-before felt desires in him.

Ryuu’s life and career have no place for a male lover. But he’s already in too deep. Can he risk going all in? And what does he stand to lose if he doesn’t?

Several people have asked where I got the idea for “Love for the Cold-Blooded, Or: The Part-Time Evil Minion’s Guide to Accidentally Dating a Superhero”. I’ll try to answer this as briefly as possible… which is still not very brief at all.

You rang?

A little over a year ago, a friend recounted several interesting anecdotes from an article about serving the extremely wealthy. There was a family who entirely forgot about one of the many estates they owned, for example, while the estate in question was kept in top shape by staff: a ghost mansion running smoothly along in constant readiness for a visit that never came.

My friend also mentioned that most of the fiction she read got the details of extremely rich people’s lives wrong. Hmm, I thought. Yes, I’ve also read stories like that, and those details have always rung false to me. Fictional characters living in a billionaire’s mansion check what they have in the fridge and fix themselves a sandwich, making a mental note to go shopping because they’re almost out of ham; they call out for fast food; they forget to do the laundry; they discover they’ve run out of their favorite cereal, and squabble over who ate the last portion; they split chores like making breakfast and doing the dishes. All perfectly ordinary activities – all things that a very rich person living in a mansion would never ordinarily do.