First off, let me get this out of the way: The River Leith is on sale right now in the US and UK for .99! Go forth and grab it!
It’s been almost nine years since I released The River Leith. I look back on this book with a lot of fondness. I drafted it before I’d published anything at all, and because I didn’t know better, I took some interesting risks within it that I’d probably never take now. For example, using the device of writing one of the character’s points of view in script format because he is a vlogger. That seems incredibly edgy to me now, but I did it blithely back then. Amazing.
When I released The River Leith, it was my second best selling book, and I was gratified by the readers’ response to the book. But sometimes I like to look back at why I wrote a book. The answers are so varied, but I remember specifically why I wrote Leith and Zach’s story, and that’s because I’d become obsessed with the idea of “a second chance at a first time with the same love.”
During a period of about three years, I was so intrigued by that concept that I wrote several other first drafts of books that also feature extreme second chance romance. Books like:
- Any Given Lifetime – a book featuring a love that even death can’t defeat. Reincarnation plays a role in reunited lovers who faced a tragic end.
- Raise Up Heart – another book with death defying love. In this erotic gothic romance, a heart transplanted into another man after the death of its host, insists on being reunited with the man it loves.
- The Difference Between – in which two men get a second chance at love after a rape shatters their happy lives. This rape recovery book has a strong trigger warning at the beginning, please heed it.
- Stay Lucky – a more traditional second chance romance where one hero acknowledges he made a mistake when he left the other years before. But the inclusion of a daughter and a medical crisis make this a unique tale as well.
If you’re a fan of second chance romances or have entertained the question of how many ways a person could have a second-first-time-with-the-same-love like I have, check out any of these stories above. They are some of my most creative and brave works, all drafted originally before I was first published.