#GRL2016 Blog Tour: Featured Author Anna Zabo

Hi, I’m Anna Zabo, and I want to thank Two Chicks Obsessed for being one of the featured bloggers for GayRomLit and for hosting me on this blog tour!

GRL was the very first convention I went to as an author. This year’s GRL will be my 4^th, but will be my first as a Featured author, so, in some way, this GRL will be all new for me and I’m excited to meet old friends and make new ones!

One of the differences between my first GRL and now is that I’m writing in a different subgenre of romance. My debut book, Close Quarter, was a paranormal romance with fae and vampires and magic. All of my books after that one have been contemporary romance.

I come from a fantasy writing background, so writing paranormal came easy, but when I started my first contemporary romance, I discovered I had a serious problem: you can’t just throw an evil vampire into a scene to raise the tension.

That was a surefire way to raise the stakes in Close Quarter. Scene lagging? Have the evil vampire show up! Woo! Monster! Heroes on the run and they have to fight to stay alive!

It’s great fun to write. (And I’ll be writing more of that, soon.)

But when I started writing the book that became Takeover, I couldn’t throw a vampire at the main characters. There were no vampires, only the real world and the people, places, and problems in it.

Man, that stuff is hard to write.

At first, I thought there were no monsters in contemporary romance. Then I realized there were, but the monsters take a very very different form. There are external forces that can tear a couple apart and other people can be monstrous, but I discovered that the most interesting, the most challenging monsters are the ones inside the heroes themselves.

They’re also the ones hardest to overcome. External forces and monstrous people can be overcome and defeated, especially when the heroes work together. When the heart of conflict comes from inside a person, that’s harder to solve. It takes realization and the strength to make a personal change. It’s often a solitary fight that requires trust and love from the hero’s partner.

The thing is, these difficulties—these monsters—are so reflective of what we face in ourselves. Insecurity, doubt, fear, loneliness. Feeling unworthy of love. The internal struggles so many of us fight.

I suppose that’s why I’ve kept writing contemporary. The demons, those monsters we face inside are so challenging—and stories give us a way to overcome them. They shine light and hope and scatter the demons we fight everyday.

Romance is pretty powerful stuff. There’s light at the end of the tunnel.

In my latest release, Due Diligence, I explore quite a few internal monsters, as well as some monstrous people and what they can do to others.

A business trip leads to a surprise encounter with an old flame in this sexy romance from the author of Just Business.

After Fazil Kurt breaks up with his girlfriend, a business trip to Seattle offers some much-needed time away. Sent by S.R. Anderson Consulting, Fazil is there to help audit Singularity Storage, a company they are trying to save. His first discovery is intriguing to say the least: One of Singularity’s engineers is Todd Douglas, Fazil’s first love.

He knows better than to get personally involved on a job like this. Back in high school, Todd broke Fazil’s heart more times than he could count, but both men have grown so much since then—and Fazil never could say no to Todd…