Unison by Vivien Dean

I've had two releases in my hiatus, both at Amber Allure. The first was a short story time travel, about the dreamer in all of us.

Freddie Valek is a dreamer. He dreams about the fantastic as a means to escape, about finding the perfect man, about anything his imagination can conjure. When he falls asleep after work one day and finds himself in pre-Civil War Louisiana, he can’t say that he’s surprised. The only part of the dream that shocks him is that it’s taken him ten years to have a dream about the history of his most prized possession—a water-logged portrait of a man named Ezekiel.

All he knows about Ezekiel is what the woman who gave it to him said. That Ezekiel was the son of a plantation owner and a slave. That nobody ever found out what happened to him. Freddie’s dream thrusts him into the parents’ lives and their demands that he’s been brought to them to find their runaway son, a mission he is more than happy to accept.

But the closer Freddie gets to finding Ezekiel, the more he’s convinced that none of this is actually a dream...

I might be in a minority, but time travel is one of my favorite genres. I love the possibilities of what if, the chance of starting over in a land unknown. It's hard to write it as a short story because of the mechanics that are usually involved, so I focused on Freddie and his needs, the fact that he's a dreamer who just desperately wants to believe in the best of people..

For an excerpt and purchase information, head on over to Amber Allure!

New Contract - Unison

I just signed the contract for my upcoming time travel story, "Unison." It's part of the time travel pax at Amber Allure, though I'm not sure when it's coming out yet. Here's the blurb:

Freddie Valek is a dreamer. He dreams about the fantastic as a means to escape, about finding the perfect man, about anything his imagination can conjure. When he falls asleep after work one day and finds himself in pre-Civil War Louisiana, he can’t say that he’s surprised. The only part of the dream that shocks him is that it’s taken him ten years to have a dream about the history of his most prized possession—a water-logged portrait of a man named Ezekiel.

All he knows about Ezekiel is what the woman who gave it to him said. That Ezekiel was the son of a plantation owner and a slave. That nobody ever found out what happened to him. Freddie’s dream thrusts him into the parents’ lives and their demands that he’s been brought to them to bring back their runaway son, a mission he is more than happy to accept.

But the closer he gets to finding Ezekiel, the more convinced he is that none of it is actually a dream…

Envisioning Freddie

I'm obsessed with this photo:

This is exactly how I'm envisioning Freddie, the hero of my time travel story, right down to the semi-shy way he's peeking around his arm.

I just wish I knew who he was.

WIP Wednesday

I'm working on two short novellas right now for upcoming paxes, one about time travel and one about second chances. This is the current opening I have for my time travel story, tentatively called "Unison."

*_*_*

While nearly everyone on the midnight shift either wore ear protection or listened to music as they worked, Freddie Valek never did. It wasn’t that working in a tool manufacturer’s warehouse was so fascinating he didn’t need the distraction. It was that his imagination was more than enough to keep his brain occupied while his body did the heavy lifting. Literally.

He’d always been a dreamer. Anything could transport him from the moment, from a bird zooming across an indigo sky to more traditional methods like movies and television. Books worked, too, except for the fact that he wasn’t the greatest reader. His imagination worked faster. He could be battling trolls in a war-torn aerial kingdom or marching down the streets of Washington, DC, in hippie clothes protesting the war without ever having to sit for ten minutes trying to figure out why so many of the words swimming on the page in front of him didn’t sound at all like the way people actually talked in rural Kentucky.

He’d thought maybe it might be different when he moved to New York City in 2006. But no, words didn’t match the way people talked here, either.

Some of the guys had given him a hard time when he first started working at the warehouse, calling him a dumb hick because he couldn’t shake his accent, but that stopped not long after he dragged an old-timer out of the way of a forklift backing up into an area that was supposed to be off-limits. He never really understood why that should make a difference. After all, anyone else would’ve done the same thing. It was just common decency. But it did, which made the transition to all the choices the city had to offer that Kentucky didn’t just a little bit easier.

Hell, they even knew he was gay and didn’t give him grief for it. Not like what he’d seen other boys get back home. More proof that this was the right place for him, even those times when it felt like something was still missing.