Love on the Run Blog Tour! (+$20 Amazon GC Giveaway!)

Title: Love on the Run

Author: Dean Moore

Series: N/A

Pages: 304

Date Published: March 29th, 2014

Publisher: Dean Moore

Format: eBook

Genre:Thriller

Source: Goddess Fish Blog Tours

Synopsis:

What if the one way to pay for your ongoing cancer therapy was to rob banks? And you discovered that not only were you good at playing a thief but you could use the money to right a few other social injustices along the way?

The thing is, the FBI profiler hounding you is the best in the country, and she doesn’t much care if you have a penchant for rescuing society’s castaways.

~Guest Post!~

The Thanksgiving and Christmas Holidays are nearly upon us and, through no devious ruse of my own or ingenious marketing plan, that’s coincidentally the time period in which my story, Love on the Run, is set.  (Though now that I think of it, I may have to do a blog tour this time of year, every year, to celebrate one of my favorite novels.)

The kick-off for the romantic and comedic adventure of a lifetime is the Thanksgiving Day bank robbery masterminded by none other than our hero and heroine.  What, banks are closed on Thanksgiving Day, you say?  Well, I admit, that took some clever plot devices and workarounds at my end to ensure that at least one bank stayed open on Thanksgiving Day.  (But you’ll have to read the novel to discover the details; far be it from me to spoil the fun.)  The reason I went to such extreme lengths to justify such an outlandish robbery is that I had this amazing chase scene in my mind playing out right during the Thanksgiving Day parade between the hotshot lady FBI profiler’s posse and our unlikely heroes Zinio and Delaney.  And there was just no way I was cutting that action sequence.  In the end, I’m glad I didn’t, as it just adds to the colorful shenanigans these two are known for.

There’s perhaps something symbolic in setting the tale during the run up period to the Christmas holidays.  You see, much of the rest of the world might be celebrating their reprieve from the everyday grind that is their unappetizing jobs and sweet and sour lives, but for Zinio and Delaney there is no escape.  They live in suburbia, that black hole in space-time that sucks all the flavor out of life, and is known to strip the souls even from the devil’s collection jar to send them someplace far worse.  Our hero and heroine’s ardent determination to make mountains out of the molehills of their lives leads them to rob not just any bank, but the most unrobbable banks in the biggest cities in the U.S.  And when that doesn’t seem dashing enough, they take on the Las Vegas casinos.  There must be something nagging at them unconsciously, however.  Maybe it’s the thought that they simply can’t accept life on life’s terms, no matter how exciting it is; they’ve got to turn life into art.

Perhaps it’s that demon on their shoulders nagging them from the depths of their unconscious that spurs them to rescue other wayward souls along the way, if only to distract them from the truth of who they are.  They thus turn their mission to rescue themselves into an urban version of Robin Hood and Maid Marian and their merry men and women, stealing from the wealthy to give to the needy.  The needy in this case being the disenfranchised elderly trapped in the suburbs right along with them, and those dying without proper medical care, chief among them, Delaney herself.  But Delaney’s bleeding heart, humanitarian agendas aside, even their on-again off-again sidekicks don’t seem to quite slow the runaway locomotive driving these two.

As the profound Deepak Chopra once said, “Addicts are people looking for all the right things in all the wrong places.”  Zinio and Delaney, addicted to living life at the level of a natural high, have but one lesson to learn: they’re already so much larger than life; if they can just stop trying so hard, they might just recognize as much.

For the rest of us mortals along for the ride, who wouldn’t mind picking up a few tips from the grand masters on how we too can raise life to the level of art, Zinio and Delaney are a crash course in how to be all we can be without any of the dreary pedagogic drivel of any number of self-help books we’ve already consumed on the subject without changing the first thing about ourselves.  Maybe because outside the spell that a story well told casts over us, the magic is just incomplete. 

I won’t divulge all of Zinio’s and Delaney’s secrets.  I think that would rob you of the fun of tagging along with them on this, just the first of their journeys together.  But I will divulge this much:  their razor sharp minds don’t stay that way by accident; they have a way of keeping each other in an altered state many champion athletes refer to as “the zone” through, among other things, their whip-cracking humor.  And as Freud would say, jokes aren’t just about being funny.  Now, what they use their “peak performance” skills for exactly, well, that’s no laughing matter.  Or is it?

***

If you like the comedy-drama tone of Love on the Run, you’ll find that bleeds over into all of my books, and that includes the eleven others that fall under the categories of sci-fi and paranormal fantasy.  Please feel free to use the “contact me” form on my website to let me know of your favorite franchises and which ones you’d like me to concentrate on next.  We’ll call this crowd-sourcing of Dean’s writing and editing time.  God knows, left to my own, that choice is never easy.  

~Try an Excerpt!~

“Any big ideas, bright guy?” Delaney said, holding the broken rearview mirror in her hand to check out what was going on overhead, to avoid giving those inside the chase helicopter the satisfaction of her looking up.

           

“Just drive straight into the ocean.”

           

“Please tell me you’re joking.”

           

“Why would I be joking at a time like this?”

           

“Okay, fine, I’m sorry for picking on you so much.  I know you’re doing the best you know how.  There, I said it.  You happy?”

           

“I’m not depressed, Delaney.  I just need you to drive into the ocean.”

            

“A psychotic break?  Is that it?  You picked now for a psychotic break?  Why not all those times I chewed off your male appendage, metaphorically speaking—not to make myself out as a man-eating black widow?”

           

“You dragged along the equipment I asked you to, right?”

           

“Yeah.”

           

“So, you get it now?”

           

“Yeah, duh.  God, that just makes so much more sense in context.”

            ***

Kerry looked up from the photos of the couple to the big screen again.  Her jaw dropped as she watched Delaney drive the convertible Thunderbird straight into the ocean.  They made no attempt to get out of the vehicle; they let the sea swallow them up along with the car.

          

“Are we finally rid of them?” Carter said.

            

Kerry started chuckling slowly.  The guffawing grew into a geyser of loud laughter, which finally subsided.   “No, Carter, not yet.”  She glanced back up at the screen.  “God, that’s clever.”

~Meet Dean!~ 

I write sci-fi, fantasy, action-adventures and thrillers, or some combination thereof—usually with a strong vein of dark humor.  Though, my works are dramas first; the humor is there to take the edge off as with the Raiders of the Lost Ark, Transformers, and Jurassic Park franchises.

I wrote screenplays for a while, and while enjoying them, I found them a bit confining.  After a while you just need the extra page count to flesh out characters better and do additional world building, especially when considering doing anything epic in scope.  I also took a run at future forecasting and trend tracking, being as I always had my head in the future, things like Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock.  I also relished this, and can certainly see myself releasing a few titles accordingly in the nonfiction area.  But since delving into novels, short and long, I’ve definitely found my home and my voice.  For the first time I feel the restraints have been taken off of my imagination.  I suppose all mediums have their limits, so I may end up doing a mix of things, but I suspect I will continue to spend most of my time with novels.  Series add an additional dimension, allowing for even more depth and development both in the character and world building departments.  But I remain at heart a divergent thinker, so, no surprise, I seem to have more series going than follow up installments at this point.  That too may change over time; we’ll see.  Until then, it may be best to just think of these books as one-offs if you’re fond of my writing style and some of the themes I work with.

My current catalog of twelve books represents a little over five years' worth of work.  I'm currently averaging a couple books annually.  Of my existing franchises with multiple installments, The Hundred Year Clone books can be read in any order, while the 5 books of Renaissance 2.0 must be read in sequence as they form part of a singular story arc (much as with A Game of Thrones.)

I live in the country where I breed bluebirds, which are endangered in these parts, as my small contribution to restoring nature's balance.  When I'm not writing, or researching my next book, I may also be found socializing with friends, or working in my organic garden.

Dean will be awarding a $20 Amazon GC to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour, and a $20 Amazon GC to a randomly drawn host.

a Rafflecopter giveaway