Blogtour: Outside The Lines by Anna Zabo

Please welcome Anna Zabo with 

Outside The Lines

Bluewater Bay #22 

Blurb:

Miniature artist Ian Meyers has one week to rebuild his damaged set. Needing help, he goes to End o’ Earth, the local comic and gaming shop. Owner Simon Derry pushes all of Ian’s buttons, and he also has steady hands and the skills Ian needs.

Before they can even grab a beer, Ian meets Lydia Derry, Simon’s wife. If Ian had any interest in women, he’d suggest a threesome, but then Simon explains that he and Lydia are polyamorous, and if Ian wants Simon, neither of them will complain. If anything, Lydia encourages the relationship.

Ian’s all in, and it’s fantastic working with Simon to piece together his set and then take each other apart at night. His friendship with Lydia grows too. The only problem is, the more time he spends with Simon, the more he wants everything Simon already has with Lydia: A house. A cat. A commitment. So Ian runs, and shatters the trust he has with them both—right when they need him the most. Piecing their relationships back together might prove harder than a smashed set.

Get the book:

About Bluewater Bay:

Welcome to Bluewater Bay! This quiet little logging town on Washington state’s Olympic Peninsula has been stagnating for decades, on the verge of ghost town status. Until a television crew moves in to film Wolf’s Landing, a soon-to-be cult hit based on the wildly successful shifter novels penned by local author Hunter Easton. 

Wolf’s Landing’s success spawns everything from merchandise to movie talks, and Bluewater Bay explodes into a mecca for fans and tourists alike. The locals still aren’t quite sure what to make of all this—the town is rejuvenated, but at what cost? And the Hollywood-based production crew is out of their element in this small, mossy seaside locale. Needless to say, sparks fly. 

This collaborative story world is brought to you by eleven award-winning, best-selling LGBTQ romance authors: L.A. Witt, L.B. Gregg, Z.A. Maxfield,  Heidi Belleau, Rachel Haimowitz, Anne Tenino, Amy Lane, SE Jakes, G.B. Gordon, Jaime Samms and Ally Blue. Each contemporary novel stands alone, but all are built around the town and the people of Bluewater Bay and the Wolf’s Landing media empire.  

Check it out at Riptide Publishing!

Sharing a World

When the Bluewater Bay series first started, I snatched up all the books I could, because I really like the idea of authors writing in a shared world and I admired the authors who could do that. The concept was fun and different and led itself to all kinds of novels and relationships. Some were serious, others campy and fun.

And I was a little envious because I was pretty sure I couldn’t write in a shared world. I don’t actually know why I felt this. Maybe because most of my writing has been in worlds of my own making (with the exception of on piece of Shakespeare fanfic), or set in the real world.

But the idea of Bluewater Bay lingered enough until LA Witt shared the series bible with me. You know, in case I wanted to try to write a Bluewater Bay book. I read it and I pondered and I thought about the unnamed comic book shop next to the unnamed Wolf’s Landing merchandise shop and little bits and pieces of a story started to come together.

And you know? It was fun! I still got to flesh out the world my characters inhabited, like the comic shop and Simon and Lydia’s home and bits of the giant Wolf’s Landing studio lot. But I also had some ready-made places I could reference and well-loved characters who could wander in and interact with mine.

It was downright fun to revisit with some of my favorite characters from the series, as I pulled them into Ian, Simon, and Lydia’s story. Because Bluewater Bay is all of those characters and all of those stories. I tried to do them justice when they did, too. I was so aware I was writing someone else’s person.

In turn, Simon, Lydia, and Ian get to make appearances in New Hand, the last Bluewater Bay novel and that’s cool too. I’ve never read anyone else writing my characters before, so that’ll be a treat to read..

Yeah, I’m sad to see Bluewater Bay come to an end with New Hand, but I’m really glad I got to be a part of the tale of the town. And this won’t be my last shared world novel, so stay turned.

I do hope you enjoy reading about Ian, Simon, and Lydia and their story in Bluewater Bay!

About the author:

Anna Zabo writes contemporary and paranormal romance for all colors of the rainbow. They live and work in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which isn’t nearly as boring as most people think.

Anna grew up in the wilds of suburban Philadelphia before returning to their ancestral homelands in Western Pennsylvania. As a child they were heartily disappointed to discover that they couldn’t grow up to be what they wanted (a boy, a cat, a dragon), so they settled on being themself whenever possible, which may be a combination of a boy, a cat, and a dragon. Or perhaps a girl, a knight, and a writer. Depends on whom you ask. They do have a penchant for colorful ties and may be hording a small collection of cufflinks.They can be easily plied with coffee.

Anna has an MFA in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University, where they fell in with a roving band of romance writers and never looked back. They also have a BA in Creative Writing from Carnegie Mellon University.

Find Anna on Twitter.

Giveaway:

To celebrate the release of Outside the Lines, one lucky winner will receive a $25 Riptide credit! Leave a comment with your contact info to enter the contest. Entries close at midnight, Eastern time, on December 23, 2017. Contest is NOT restricted to U.S. entries. Thanks for following the tour, and don’t forget to leave your contact info!

Promotional post. Materials provided by the publisher.