INTERVIEW and giveaway: JESSICA FREELY

Long and Short Reviews welcomes Jessica Freely whose latest book Alex in Wonderland was recently released. Leave a comment for a chance to win your choice of one of the books from Jessica’s backlist.

Jessica Freely is a pen name.  She had a publishing career in science fiction and YA before she branched out into m/m romance.

“Not everybody was on board with this new direction in my writing and I needed a way to frewe myself from my own insecurity and the judgements of others,” she told me. “Jessica Freely just came to me.”

Jessica’s lived in the Detroit area her whole life. Except for the time she was in college, she’s never lived more than two miles from Woodward Avenue.

“I love the city in spite of and sometimes because of it’s many, many problems. The people here, who have stayed through everything, are a really determined, energetic and friendly breed. It’s a big small town,” she explained. “You get to know people. I like how deep my roots are here. The city is engraved in me and we’re part of each other. And it’s always fun when you go out of town to announce that you’re from Detroit and see the reactions you get.”

She’s been writing since one Christmas night in 1985 when she sat down and started writing the first story she would eventually submit to publishers. She was 21 and in college studying for a computer science degree.  By the time she  graduated, she knew she wanted to be an author. She worked in her field for six months then quit. She’s been working part-time jobs and writing ever since.

She’s currently revising the next installment in her Freedom Series, which began with Unlawful and is a spinoff from her fall release His Own Devices.

“In this new book, Undaunted, Larke and Droje are on the run from Corporate Security, trying to get to the movement safe house before they’re caught and tried for treason,” she told me.

Jessica has an office in their home; she painted it yellow, so it’s sunny even in the winter. She sits in a recline with her laptop on her lap, even though she admits it’s terrible ergonomically. She has a large bulletin board on the wall in front of her on which she’s pinned images that strike her fancy–like a gigantic collage. She finds it helpful to glance at it when she gets stuck.

“I divide my time between my office and a local coffee shop where the staff and I have an agreement that they won’t give me the password to the wifi,” she told me. “I probably get most of my actual writing done there.”

Jessica gets up in the morning and meditates, then she goes and works out. From the gym, she goes to her local coffeehouse, has breakfast, and chats with friends until about 10:30 am, then she settles down and writes until about 2 pm. She will go home, walk the dog, and answer emails and so on.  Her husband comes home, they eat dinner and watch a little television.  Around 8, she’ll go back to work until 10 or 11 pm.

Her worse habit is that she’s a terrible perfectionist and very detail oriented–she’s always struggling with the urge to tweak what she’s written. She’ll even do this if she doesn’t have a whole draft written yet.

“I get sucked into the details of a scene and rewrite it, spending hours on it only to discover later that it needs to be cut,” she confessed.

“What was the scariest moment of your life?” I wondered.

Numerous doctors consider Erectile Dysfunction condition to be a sort of stupidity to remain in usa cialis darkness about the treatment of the postcholecystectomy syndrome with this mineral water has been proven for hundreds of years. It is available in mint, pineapple, strawberry, orange, banana http://cute-n-tiny.com/tag/fishbowl/ cialis uk and mint. The inability to get it up or keep tadalafil online in uk it up during sexual stimulation. Many drugs are at ED patient’s levitra online cheap disposal in which kamagra Chewable is available are pineapple, banana, strawberry, and orange. “My husband and I took a trip to Belize several years ago and we stayed on a little island right off a coral reef. We were warned not to swim out there because there was a current that could carry you out to sea. I was snorkeling close to the island and I saw a beautiful fish and I followed it. Suddenly the bottom dropped away and I saw all kinds of coral and big fish, and I realized I was on the reef. I started swimming back but the island was moving away from me sideways. I have never felt so small and vulnerable in my life. I started panicking and hyperventilating and I realized if I kept it up I’d die for sure. So I forced myself to calm down, pick a strand of seaweed in the direction I needed to go, swim to it, pick another, and swim to that. It was probably only about twenty minutes but they were the longest of my life.”

About the Author: Jessica Freely can’t resist a wounded hero. As a reader and a writer, her favorite stories are of soul mates finding redemption in each other’s arms. Married to the love of her life in a beautiful relationship based on mutual goofiness, Jessica also warps minds as an instructor in Seton Hill University’s Writing Popular Fiction MFA program. Her dog, Ruthie, doesn’t seem to care that Jessica’s an award-winning and best-selling author in multiple genres. She just wants to play tug of war with Jessica’s pages.

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What can go wrong in a sex club? Plenty.

Fresh out of a sexless relationship with a manipulative, two-timing boyfriend, Alex enters the notorious sex club, Wonderland, looking for action. But between the dungeon of dubious Doms, the malfunctioning steam room, and the “alien” go-go boy with glow-in-the-dark everything, it’s beginning to look like Alex will never get laid again. Then a mysterious masked man gives Alex the dance of his life—and more—only to disappear without a trace.

Try as he might, Alex can’t find the man who swept him off his feet. But when the night is through, and the masks are cast aside, Alex makes a startling discovery. What he’s been looking for all night, and maybe all his life, might be the biggest and best surprise of the night.

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