Dipped in Sunshine Surfing the Waves, Book 2
LGBTQ+ Romance, Romantic Comedy
April 29, 2022
250 pages
“You think you can do the jiggy with my baby brother, without wooing him for approximately three years first? Hah! I hope you weren’t too attached to your toenails.”
Fifty is a simple man. He doesn’t know much, but he knows this: to stay well clear of Otto Eggebraaten. The nineteen-year-old is cute, blond, and trouble. His overprotective big brother, Eggy, hounds Otto’s every move.
Outwardly, Fifty’s life is good. He surfs, teaches other folks to surf, drinks beer, and hangs with his friends. But with his thirtieth birthday on the horizon, he’s hoarding a secret he’s too ashamed to confide in anyone, even his best friend, Eggy. When Otto accidentally discovers it, Fifty finds his ordered, and lonely existence unravelling in a way he never expected.
Dipped In Sunshine is an age gap, best friend’s brother romance, featuring a cinnamon roll demisexual surfer and a determined blond fluffball. It can be read as a standalone.
2022 RCA Author Interview with Fearne Hill
Interview by Sherry Perkins
Fearne Hill is an award-winning contemporary romance author who just happens to also be an anesthesiologist in her spare time. And maybe a bit of a keen observer of human emotion. Plus, she has a few hens, tortoises, and a cocker spaniel in the English countryside where she somehow manages to make it all work.
Two Tribes – best contemporary
INSPIRATION: This story is set in 1990s Britain; two eighteen-year-olds exploring their sexuality during a period of UK political history that was not kind to queer people. Britain in the 1990s was seen as a fun progressive time – Britpop, new labour, girl power etc, and for many, it was. But the Section 28 ruling was in place, banning any cultural references, books, and teaching pertaining to homosexuality, so for a lot of young queer people, struggling to find their identities, times were very tough. And very few queer books, especially in the romance genre, tell stories from this time.
The main character, Matt, and his friends are based on real people.
WHY SHOULD IT WIN?
I think this book should win because it resonates with a lot of queer men’s stories during this time period; many of the people from that era fought hard to win the freedoms and rights queer people have today. I have been overwhelmed with messages from readers who can relate to Matt’s story. It is certainly the book of which I’m most proud.
Dipped In Sunshine- best contemporary
My inspiration for this was the summer sunshine! I had so much fun writing it! The older guy is a surf instructor, and all the action takes place in a Spanish holiday resort.
My other inspiration comes from my main career – I’m an anaesthesiologist, and one of the characters has a chronic illness, the other suffers erectile dysfunction. I often write characters with medical issues as being a doctor, I find them relatively easy to portray.
WHY SHOULD IT WIN?
I don’t think this book should win, because although it’s a fun read, it is ultimately fluff. Two Tribes should win!
Surfing the Waves – best series (Brushed with Love and Dipped in Sunshine)
My inspiration: you know that feeling when a really hot Portuguese builder does some work at your house and so you decide to write a book about him, and it turns into a story about a Norwegian house painter named Ragnar Aleksander Sigurdson Eggebraaten who believes he’s still a Viking who falls in love with a nerdy emo writer?
WHY SHOULD IT WIN?
Why should it win? Because the Norwegian house painter has dyslexia, and the nerdy emo writer reads The Captive Prince out loud to him on a long train journey, and it’s effing adorable. Oh, and the Viking is stunningly beautiful, and they have a lot of hot sex.
To Melt a Frozen Heart – best short novel
My inspiration: I love a redemption story, and the main protagonist in this is a wicked uncle in my Rossingley series. He’s a posh right-wing politician and reaching his 60th birthday. I decided to have some fun with him and make him accidentally fall in love with a leftie pot-smoking gardener.
WHY SHOULD IT WIN?
Why should it win? Because I have managed to make an over privileged, insensitive, posh, old fart freaking adorable. And there aren’t enough stories out there about 60-year-old gays playing Scrabble, drinking quality vino, and getting it on.
- Turn off the telly.
- Read a tonne of books in any genre.
- Write down whatever story is running around in your head.
- When you get to the difficult bits, don’t fret, don’t let it stop your flow. Miss them out and focus on the easy bits.
- When you can’t avoid it any longer, get the hard bits down. Just chunk them and do it. I find gin helps.
- When you’ve written your masterpiece, leave it marinating for a month or two.
- Go back and improve the fuck out of it. Rinse and repeat several times.
- By the time the thing is published, and you drank enough gin, then you won’t be able to spot the bits you really struggled with.
- Other alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages are also available.
Two Tribes
“Why don’t they bloody shift Remembrance Day to July?”
Since we’d formed shuffling, scruffy lines around the cenotaph, Brenner had bitched non-stop. “It would make a hell of a lot more sense than holding it in November. I’m freezing my fucking nads off here.”
Drizzling rain, of the old-fashioned, relentless, British variety, poured insult onto injury. Brenner, Phil, and I hunched our shoulders, pulling frayed cuffs over icy hands stuffed into trouser pockets. We endeavoured to look cool. Cool in the he-could-be-the-bass-player- from-Blur sort of way, not cool in the it’s-bitterly-cold-I-wish-I’d-brought-my-anorak sort of way. Coats were for losers, like the smart posh kids lined up in the row in front of us. None of whom shivered.
“Yeah, Brenner. Couldn’t agree more.”
In my experience, sarcasm was lost on him, but I tried anyhow. “They should have shown more consideration when they ended World War One on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, shouldn’t they?”
Shit, that wind was fucking cold. Siberian. “They should have carried on annihilating each other for another six months, so future namby-pamby generations didn’t have to freeze in a school playground for half an hour, once every year. I mean, compared to this, trench warfare must have been a piece of piss.”
Brenner had been one of my best mates since playschool, but, bloody hell, he was thick sometimes.
“The Second World War ended in the summer though,” pointed out Phil, my other best mate, obviously feeling pretty pleased with himself. “Brenner’s right. We could mark that date instead.”
Christ, he was a fucking idiot, too. “Maybe the reason we don’t,” I enunciated, as if explaining to a pair of three-year-olds, “Is because Remembrance Day was a thing since before the Second World War actually, y’know, happened?”
“Oh.” Phil’s head jerked in a quick nod. Or perhaps it was a shiver. He gave me a sharp nudge, followed by a snigger. “Nips alert at three o’clock. Looks like Claire Evans is fucking freezing too.”
Dipped In Sunshine
Afterwards, curled up against me, he announced, “I’ve been reading.”
Dawn light loved Otto. Soft orangey rays poured through the cracks in my drawn blinds, dappling the exposed pale skin of his shoulders in an almost shimmery glow.
I ran my stubbly jaw lightly across one of them, causing him to squirm against me. “Should I be worried?”
“Did you know your testosterone levels are highest at about eight in the morning?”
“What, mine in particular?”
“No, Christian.” He rolled his eyes at me. “Duh. Men in general.”
“Good to know. And I’m supposed to do what, exactly, with this information?”
“So, it’s a good time for us to have lots of sex.” He put a finger to my mouth, tracing along the line of my lips, his own lips pursed as if deep in thought.
I had an insane urge to blurt out ‘I love you’, but held back, as it would most likely send him running for the hills. Which was precisely why falling for a teenager was a dick move.
“I want to have proper sex with you soon, Christian. You know, like, proper.”
Yeah. Like, I knew.
The sentence hung there between us, mostly because I couldn’t think of a suitable response. My answer was a yes, obviously. Looking back, it had been a huge fucking yes since we first kissed, but, me being me, that yes came with enough baggage to fill the hold of a jumbo jet. It felt like no time at all since I confessed my humiliating erectile problems to a kindly female doctor. Now, I lay in bed with my eager young lover, post-orgasm, and about to discuss future orgasms.
And, knowing Otto, we’d be discussing in some detail.
“So, you need to familiarise yourself with the location of your prostate if you haven’t already. That was the other thing I’ve been reading about. And whether we use condoms or not.”
I couldn’t remember the name of the dude who invented the internet, but he had a hell of a lot to answer for.
To Melt a Frozen Heart
“Hello, I’m guessing this isn’t your scene either.”
I turned, prepared to look down, but found myself tilting my gaze slightly upwards, into narrowed grey eyes. The voice was low and devoid of the local country burr. Automatically, I held out my hand.
“Charles Avery, how do you do.” God, I sounded pompous.
The stranger’s steady gaze was eerily serene; if I had to choose one adjective to describe his eyes, I’d plump for ‘knowing’. As he leisurely scrutinized my face, I had the uncomfortable sensation he’d already extracted and filed away my deepest secrets merely from the act of me returning his gaze.
I pumped his cool hand, pathetically grateful to him for rescuing me, although I wasn’t entirely sure from where he’d materialised. Possibly the nineteenth century, if his outfit was anything to go by. The man was tall and thin—elegantly so. A faded burgundy velvet smoking jacket hung from his angular frame; he had carelessly tied a paisley silk cravat around his neck. A Bohemian type, the likes of which I hadn’t encountered since my Cambridge days. Indeed, we were of a similar age.
Measuring oneself against one’s peers is a deeply embedded facet of human nature. As reflexive as breathing. It begins on the school playing fields, where we note and celebrate the fastest, the strongest, the fittest. Then, as we pass through the years, more successful young men display their rank by purchasing sportier cars, receiving bigger bonuses, and securing prettier wives. Followed by more expensive divorces.
With all that nonsense behind me, these days I found myself measuring success in terms of hair follicles. And against this fine figure of a man, I fell woefully short. A luxuriant silvery mane swept back from a high forehead hung down his back, neatly secured with a black hair band.
“George,” he returned eventually, holding the handshake fractionally longer than comfortable. “George Samwise.”
ABOUT FEARNE HILL:
Fearne Hill lives deep in the southern British countryside with varying numbers of hens, a few tortoises, and a beautiful cocker spaniel. She likes it that way.
When she is not overseeing her small menagerie, she enjoys writing contemporary queer romance. She publishes with Nine Star Press and independently. And when she is not doing either of those things, she is working as an anaesthesiologist.
CONTACT FEARNE HILL AND ORDER Dipped in Sunshine, Brushed with Love, Two Tribes, and To Melt a Frozen Heart AT:
Amazon: Amazon.com: Fearne Hill: books, biography, latest update
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1172459269938382/
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/19829861.Fearne_Hill