New Amsterdam by H.J. Raine and Kelly Wyre
The name and description of the setting for the New Amsterdam series has me immediately adding it to my TBR list. Here’s how it all started….
Hello, everyone!
It’s good to be here. I’m H. J. Raine, and Kelly and I have series of books set in New Amsterdam, a fictional city that blends NYC landscape, Chicago’s political machine, and Gotham’s darkness. Murder, mayhem, intrigue, and intimacy are the stock in trade on these city streets, and rarely is anything exactly what it seems.
Our first book in the series was Hearts Under Fire. Here’s Kelly on how this all started:
I figure the first secret to spill is that Hearts didn’t start out as a book. It began as a role play between myself and my partner in crime and chaos, HJ Raine. I’d read Raine’s stories on various online sites a couple of years before meeting the person behind the monikers, and it turns out, Raine had read me, too. I explained I had this world called New Amsterdam and a bartender who owned a pivot point location called Glow, and off we went without so much as a glance back at the Land of Sanity. We wrote the entire beast in three weeks, and it was far, FAR longer than its much-neater published length. God bless editors, yes? (Somebody has to. *wink*)
Raine and I still write by picking characters and figuring out how to mod them. It’s fantastic fun. So much fun, in fact, we can’t possibly stop, and now Raine and I are happily whirling balls of energy rolling down the steep hills of creation.
For me, it was very inspiring and challenging to play off of Kelly’s work, having to meet her abilities with words and the intensity of her characterizations, and do it head-on and in real time. Both of us surprised the heck out of each other on many occasions with interactions and ideas that made it all the better.
Best of all was having a partner who would say, “Yes, I can work with that!” And then have her take it all the further. All the conversations turned into something magical because both characters weren’t in the same mind, so both Clark and Daniel had blind spots with respect to each other and said things the other never expected.
It helped that both of us have experience in the Scene, since we decided to jump into the fray with a BDSM book. We knew each others philosophies from the fiction that we’d read, including the belief that the Scene allows people to love each other in ways few people really explore, it worked very well in Hearts Under Fire and in the subsequent books.
Thanks for the opportunity to share.
H.J. Raine and Kelly Wyre
New Amsterdam Series — Kinky Romance At Its Finest
You can find Raine at Shiva Wept and Kelly at Kelly Wyre’s Fire Nest
4 Responses to “New Amsterdam by H.J. Raine and Kelly Wyre”
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It’s fascinating to hear how the story started between you, and what a boon to have someone you can work with like that! The book looks great 🙂
Thank you so much! And yes, working with Raine is the best kind of addictive activity for which I am quite grateful. =)
What a sexy looking book!
*grins* Thank you! Guns and mostly-naked men… definitely in my Top Five Ways to Start a Good Day.