Private Internship
An Art of Love Novel
Kitsy Clare
New Adult Romance
Inkspell Publishing
September 29, 2014
Sometimes sugar isn’t so sweet and secrets can be deadly . . . especially
with matters of the heart.
Sienna’s bestie, Harper warned her not to intern for famous bad boy artist,
Casper Mason. After all, he just fired Harper who helped Sienna get the
interview. But the moment Sienna sees Casper—or Caz—sweaty, practically
shirtless and swinging from chains as he works on his sculpture, she’s hooked.
He’s the richest, hottest artist in New York, and he lives in the fabulous
Williamsburg Sugar Factory. But he’s also an incorrigible game-player, who
seems to relish testing Sienna’s loyalty with a string of unsettling tests.
She knows she should get away fast. But by the time Sienna sneaks into his
locked storage room and begins to unearth his dark and terrifying secret, she’s
fallen way too hard for the handsome, charismatic Caz.
Teaser
The death card is last. Like
the queen of swords it’s reversed. As I flip through the book to interpret the
card, a rush of fear crashes through me—fear for Caz. Holy shit! I don’t want
to forecast his death or anything as horrendous. This card reading was a lousy
idea after all. It’s bad enough we’re trapped here with no power, no lights, no
heat, but the Death card, staring at us with its sunken eyes and a creepy
battle-axe in its bony claws?
I release a huge sigh of
relief as I skim the meaning of the reversed card. “Oh, wow, it’s good, Caz!”
“Really?” The bubble of hope
in his tone catches me off-guard. He takes this seriously? If he can lie about how seriously he takes Tarot, what else can he
lie about?
Guest Post
New Adult Contemporary Romance: Expanding Beyond the College Campus
by Kitsy Clare
New
adult romance exploded on the scene a few years after St. Martins Press ran a
contest that stated: Since
twenty-somethings are devouring YA, St. Martin’s Press is seeking fiction
similar to YA that can be published and marketed as adult—a sort of an “older
YA” or “new adult” fiction.” Readers clamored for novels that described the
college experience, first full-time jobs, and their first steamy adult romances
as people hit their twenties.
NA authors delved
deeply into issues such as in Tammara Webber’s powerful exploration of abuse in Easy, but the novels were always set in
college, the drama often occurring in dorms and fraternity parties.
As the genre grows,
authors are eager to expand into new subgenres and settings outside of college
walls and break out of narrow confines that squeeze the genre into limited
pigeonholes. Courtney
Lewis, a librarian and blogger, otherwise known as the Sassy Librarian reports
on a recent NA panel she attended: “It was suggested that the genre might gain more
legitimacy when readers (and librarians and publishers) begin associating it
with other genres, broadening the scope of the label.” I heartily agree.
Gritty
NA romance that deals with more universal survival skills than the limited
setting of the dorm scene is popping up all over. One example is J.R.
Redmerski’s The Edge of Never, where
the setting is literally the highway. Camryn decides to take a long road trip
to reassess the life she’s lived thus far. Another is Collide by Gail McHugh, where Emily moves to NYC to be closer to
her boyfriend, but ends up working in an Italian restaurant and meeting a new
love. A third example is Nikki Turner’s Project
Chick, the saga of a young urban single mom.
In
writing my first NA romance, Model
Position I stuck to the well-oiled trope template and set it in college.
Well, I did stray a little; setting it in art school, where no one lived in
dorms, but already had their own edgy apartments in Manhattan’s East Village.
Still, many of the scenes were set in the drawing class.
But
for the next in my NA Art of Love series, Private
Internship I had a different idea for the setting. Artist Sienna’s bad-boy
love interest is a sculptor she interns for. He creates installations out of
sugar. What better setting than the factory building I’ve been I’ve been
obsessed with for decades: specifically the Domino Sugar Factory in Williamsburg,
Brooklyn. In it, Caz Mason has tons and tons of sugar to play around with!
You
see, I moved right around the corner from that spooky factory before the
neighborhood became a hipster paradise. I recall strolling by it when it was
still in business, ever eager to see which cargo ship had docked on its East River
port. They came from Cuba, Brazil, even Thailand—a myriad of exotic, faraway
places. Here’s a summary of Private
Internship:
Sienna’s bestie,
Harper warned her not to intern for famous bad boy artist, Casper Mason. After
all, he just fired Harper who helped Sienna get the interview. But the moment
Sienna sees Casper—or Caz—sweaty and practically shirtless and swinging from
chains while he works on his sculpture, she’s hooked. He’s the richest, hottest
artist in New York, and he lives in the fabulous Williamsburg Sugar Factory.
But he’s also an incorrigible game-player, who seems to relish testing Sienna’s
loyalty with a string of unsettling tests.
She knows she should
get away fast. But by the time Sienna sneaks into his locked storage room and
begins to unearth his dark and terrifying secret, she’s fallen way too hard for
the handsome, charismatic Caz.
Little
did I know that my setting for this novel was going to be a constant fixture in
the news last summer when famous sculptress Kara Walker would set up her regal
sugar sphinx mama in that doomed place. As Walker explains through her sugar
slave boys who, in the heat of the summer, were literally melting—an arm
dropping off here, a nose there, the sugar trade was a very nasty business,
fueled by oppressed slaves hauled in from Africa to the Caribbean and
elsewhere.
Coincidentally,
in Private Internship I have Caz
quoting from Voltaire’s Candide, when
a horrified Candide comes across a slave boy who’s lost an arm and leg. The boy
explains: “When we work in the sugar mills and get a finger caught in the
machinery, they cut off the hand; but if we try to run away, they cut off a leg
… it is the price we pay for the sugar you eat in Europe.”
Caz
is no fool; he’s aware of the dark side of his spun-sugar art medium.
Ironically, as he tears three sugar packets and pours one after the other into
his gourmet blend coffee, he says to Sienna in all seriousness, “Sugar, it’s
delicious yet deadly, sweet yet bitter to the arteries. It’s no good for
anyone.”
Still,
out of Caz and Sienna’s power struggles, a sweet romance just might emerge. And
what better place to set it in than an actual defunct sugar factory! So, choose
your settings with care. Make sure you’re as passionate about them as you are
about your characters and the steamy romance blossoming between them. Don’t get
me wrong, a good college romance can still be a fabulous read. But if you’re
writing NA romance, be brave, and consider writing beyond the confines of dorm
life. If it’s an exciting time and place to you, it will surely be exciting to
your readers, as well.
About the Author
Kitsy Clare hails from Philadelphia and lives in New
York. A romantic at heart, she loves to write about the sexy intrigue of
the city, and particularly of the art world. She knows it well,
having shown her paintings here before turning to writing. Model Position,
her new adult novella is about artist Sienna and her friends. Living
in a Bookworld says: "Beautifully written! We get to learn things
about art & painting, which is refreshing. A colorful story from
a promising new adult author." The next in her Art of Love series,
Private Internship launches in September with Inkspell.
Kitsy loves to travel, draw, read romance, speculative fiction and teach
writing workshops. She also writes YA as Catherine Stine. Her
futuristic thriller, Ruby's Fire was a YA finalist in the Next
Generation Indie book awards. Fireseed One, its companion novel, was a
finalist in YA and Sci-Fi in the USA News International Book Awards,
and an Indie Reader notable. Her YA horror, Dorianna, launches fall 2014
with Evernight Teen. She's a member of SFWA, RWA and SCBWI.
Author
links:
Tour-Wide Giveaway
a Rafflecopter giveaway
