Blood Red Roulette

I think it means something about the state of my life that it took me two weeks to finally post about finally finishing a novel I've been working so hard for so long to finish. Blood Red Roulette has been literally a journey of two decades. It originally was set somewhere other than Las Vegas and only hinted at the fact that Arrigo was bisexual and Luc's sexuality wasn't even a thing. It was also a short story.

A cursed short story.

It was bought THREE times and each time the magazine went belly up before publication. After that I stuck it in a drawer until I dusted off another short story in the series of them Crisis in Faith for one of Dreamspinner's Christmas anthologies. Although it was set at the holiday it didn't really capture what they were after however they wanted it as an independent short story. It's been hanging around for a while now.

However that got me thinking about the story of how Arrigo and Luc met. It was no longer 1996 where if you wrote gay fiction it had to be under a man's name and you were worried to death that any other publisher didn't find out about it because some of them had restrictions about publishing someone who had published a gay story. Seriously, it was right in their submission guidelines. It's a new and slightly better day now. For the past few camp nanos I've been trying to finish the story. I even made one trip out to Vegas which resulted in me moving where Arrigo lives (which probably doesn't jive with that short story).

I think I need another research trip, just saying.

Anyhow, I've finally typed 'the end' on it. I'm not done by any means. It needs a lot of editing so I am going to miss my goal of having it submitted by the end of the year but I decided to be gentle with myself on this. 2015 has been a horrible year. I did my best. I DID finish. That is enough. It probably needs another beta reader. I KNOW I have a lot of repetition in it and there are some places where I know I need to shore up character motivation.

The hardest part of adapting this from the original short is that in the short story both Arrigo and the villain, Eleni had to be complete and utter idiots in order for the action to play out in under 10K. Obviously that had to change. Eleni still has to make a few dumb mistakes because honestly how does one person with no resources find another person in a city the size of Vegas? Eleni has a hand in her own defeat I'm afraid to say.

I'm still very uncertain about this story. Yes there is a hefty dose of romance in it. However, I think it would be better suited to the non-romance lines. I'm going to have to have a conversation with Dreamspinner before submission. I'm waiting until it's better edited and the story is stronger and more ready to go.

But at the end of the day, I have finished another novel and I should be proud.