Straight Shooter : Blog Hop

April 11, 2014 by Pip

Hi there! Today we are pleased to welcome back author Heidi Belleau! Heidi is here to talk to us about her release, Straight Shooter, the latest in her Rear Entrance Video series. Heidi has brought along some fun hockey facts and a great giveaway. So please join us in giving her a big welcome!

Hello hello! I’m Heidi Belleau, and welcome to the Riptide Books “Straight Shooter” blog tour! Straight Shooter is the third (and final?) novel in my Rear Entrance Video series, and is the story of roommate Austin, a homophobic hockey player with a kinky secret . . . and the Dominant porn star who helps him get his act together. For the next two weeks, I’ll be hopping blog to blog giving you an inside look at the novel . . . and also giving away a prize! Read on for details! Thanks to Live Your Life, Buy the Book and to all of you for tuning in!

5 THINGS I LEARNED ABOUT HOCKEY

So I had this great idea to write a romance about a hockey player. I figured, hey, I’m Canadian, how hard can it be?

HA. HA HA HA HA.

I wound up researching as much as some people probably do for their historicals. And I probably still screwed stuff up! At least I had my hockey beta Julio Alexi Genao to do a read-over, but here are a few things I learned through this whole journey. Maybe this will help my fellow hockey newbies in their reading. Or maybe it’ll just be one more thing for the hockey fans reading the book/this tour to laugh at.

1. Simon Fraser University, the school Austin and Christian both attend in the series, is a real university. It also . . . doesn’t actually have a hockey team. Football, soccer, volleyball, wrestling, golf, sure. Hockey? No. Well, in the alternate universe of Rear Entrance Video, they do. Because creative license. Oops.
2. Hockey players do as much working out off ice as they do on it. Straight Shooter largely happens during the so-called “off season”, just by virtue of the timing of the REV books, so I wrote a lot of the team doing training. For reference, I used Nike’s “The Program”, which to my out of shape self seems positively grueling. (And for those of you who like to watch videos of muscular men in tight clothes doing floor exercises, The Program is also on youtube—you’re welcome!)
3. Hockey teams are sprawling affairs: beyond the six guys per team on the ice at any one time (for my fellow newbies, that’s the goalie, the center forward, the right and left wingers, and two people playing defense), there are also whole lineups of other players waiting to be substituted in. NHL teams have at least twenty players, including two goalies. For Straight Shooter, I named, chose playing positions, and wrote basic bios for the entire lineup of Austin’s team. It took awhile.
4. Hockey has its own language. Here are just a few of the terms I used in Straight Shooter:

• deke: faking out an opposing player
• pest: a player who specifically sets out to provoke the other team into starting fights or committing penalties
• Enforcer: also known as a goon, the enforcer is a player who might not be terribly skilled at actually playing hockey, but is good at fighting and protecting other players. They do the team’s dirty work.
• body checking: using your body to knock another player out of the way, down to the ice, or against the boards
• icing: when a player shoots the puck past the center line and the opposing team’s goal line without any other player touching it (aka shooting it all the way to the other end of the rink) . . . but only if it doesn’t score a goal or come into contact with the goalie
• puck bunny: an offensive term referring to female hockey fans who are only into the game because of their sexual attraction (and availability) to hockey players
• roughing: a penalty for shoving, hitting, or striking other players when the infraction isn’t severe enough to count as fighting (which is that bit where players take off gloves/helmets, grab each others shirts, and go to town)

5. The Toronto Maple Leafs are an easy target when you want to insult an incompetent NHL team, but if you insult them in a passage that you then let your hockey (and Leafs) fan father read, be prepared to get the cold shoulder for at least a week or more.

ABOUT THE BOOK

This macho jock has a crooked little secret.

College hockey player Austin Puett is in trouble. Unless he starts treating his flamboyantly gay roommate with respect, he’ll lose his room and his job at Rear Entrance Video. But Austin’s got a not-so-straight secret of his own: nothing turns him on more than insults implying he’s gay—even though he’s definitely not!—and all his old coping methods have stopped working.

Pure desperation drives him to rent a Mischievous Pictures porn flick about straight men tricked into servicing Puck, a male dominant. Instead of letting off steam, though, it just leaves him craving more, more, more, and suddenly, Austin finds himself at Mischievous Pictures Studios for an audition. After all, you can be Gay For Pay and still be straight . . . right?

But meeting Liam Williams, the real person behind Puck, confuses Austin even more. Liam really seems to like him as a person, and Austin likes him back. And while Gay For Pay’s okay, what does it make Austin if he still wants Liam when the cameras aren’t rolling?

You can read an excerpt and purchase “Straight Shooter” today from Riptide!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Heidi Belleau was born and raised in small town New Brunswick, Canada. She now lives in the rugged oil-patch frontier of Northern BC with her husband, an Irish ex-pat whose long work hours in the trades leave her plenty of quiet time to write. She has a degree in history from Simon Fraser University with a concentration in British and Irish studies; much of her work centered on popular culture, oral folklore, and sexuality, but she was known to perplex her professors with papers on the historical roots of modern romance novel tropes. (Ask her about Highlanders!) Her writing reflects everything she loves: diverse casts of characters, a sense of history and place, equal parts witty and filthy dialogue, the occasional mythological twist, and most of all, love—in all its weird and wonderful forms. She also writes queer-flavoured M/F as Heloise Belleau.

Comment to win! I’m giving away ebooks one and two of the Rear Entrance Video series (that’s “Apple Polisher” and “Wallflower”) to not one, but two lucky commenters on this tour! All you gotta do is leave a comment on this post with a way to contact you (and if your preferred method of contact is email, make sure to put that in the body of the comment, not just in the blog’s form—I can’t see that info! Each comment counts for another entry in the draw, so be sure and follow the entire tour. Entries close at midnight, Eastern Time, on April 21, and winners will be chosen on April 23rd. Contest is valid worldwide.

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