This is for a new group I’ve just joined on FB, where authors post 6 (ish) sentences on a Sunday, taken from a WIP, a new book, or an old one. Sounds like fun (although it was unexpectedly hard to choose my snippet!)  I’ve chosen this one from Out! because it encapsulates a major source of conflict for my characters:

Patrick stared at the cover of the DVD in his hands. Gordon Warnecke and Daniel Day-Lewis with a bad bleach job stared back at him, the Asian guy defiant but the white guy with a sardonic twist to his mouth. Patrick hadn’t watched the film in years, but now it was coming back to him. Thatcher’s Britain, AIDS hysteria, everyone out to make as much money as they could and sod everybody else. The fashions and the attitudes. It’d seemed like a history lesson when Mum had sat him down to watch it.

But Mark… Christ, Mark had lived through this.

Shit. Age wasn’t just a number, was it?

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Out! – #3 in The Shamwell Tales

When the costs are added up, will love land in the black?

Mark Nugent has spent his life in the closet—at least, the small part of it he hasn’t spent in the office. Divorced when he could no longer deny his sexuality, he’s sworn off his workaholic ways and moved to Shamwell with his headstrong teen daughter to give her a stable home environment.

His resolve to put his love life on hold is severely tested when he joins a local organization and meets a lively yet intense young man who tempts him closer to the closet threshold.

Patrick Owen is an out-and-proud charity worker with strong principles—and a newly discovered weakness for an older man. One snag: Mark is adamant he’s not coming out to his daughter, and Patrick will be damned if he’s going to start a relationship with a lie.

Between Mark’s old-fashioned attitudes and a camp, flirtatious ex-colleague who wants Mark for himself, Patrick wonders if they’ll ever be on the same romantic page. And when Mark’s former career as a tax advisor clashes with Patrick’s social conscience, it could be the one stumbling block they can’t get past.

Warning: Contains historically inaccurate Spartan costumes, mangled movie quotes, dubious mathematical logic and a three-legged pub crawl.

Due out from Samhain Publishing 19th January 2016.

Available to pre-order:    Samhain | Amazon | ARe