Spotlight & Giveaway: Into the Midnight Wood by Alexandra McCollum

Today it is my pleasure to Welcome author Alexandra McCollum to HJ!

Hi Alexandra and welcome to HJ! We’re so excited to chat with you about your new release, Into the Midnight Wood!

Please summarize the book for the readers here:

An uptight accountant who lives at the edge of the enchanted forest is on the verge of moving out to escape his eccentric tattoo artist roommate when a family wedding and an emerging danger in the forest force them together and make him reconsider his feelings.
 

Please share your favorite line(s) or quote from this book:

The two of them walked in silence for a moment before Meredith said, “I just like what I like, is all. Don’t see what’s the big deal about it.” He gave David a quick sideways glance. “Only if you’re asking, what am I, in my head— if you want me to put a name to things— s’pose maybe I am a bit of this and a bit of that and a sprinkle of what-have-you, but I mean, in the end, I’m just me, aren’t I?”

Please share a few Fun facts about this book…

Funny enough, I had simply titled the Scrivener file of the original draft “The Midnight Wood,” and then went through several title changes during the process of querying, submission, and editing before it ended up with nearly the same title in the end – maybe an indication of just how integral the Midnight Wood is to the story.

What first attracts your Hero to the Heroine and vice versa?

The two have been roommates for a long time. At the start of the story, David freely admits that Meredith is attractive, but denies being interested in him, although he’s not being honest with himself. He only begins to reconsider his feelings after realizing that the two of them are actually much closer than Meredith is to his unaccepting family. Meredith, on the other hand, has secretly been in love with David since before the beginning of the story, but since he flirts with everyone, David hasn’t realized (yet!).

Did any scene have you blushing, crying or laughing while writing it? And Why?

One dialogue exchange that still makes me laugh is David being characteristically humorless and self-important about the style of his sweaters (although this might be funny only to me, since I knit and in fact have made several Gansey pullovers):

“And anyway,” Meredith went on, “it’s not as if you’ve got room to talk, the way you go around with them funny fisherman sweaters all the time.”
“There is nothing humorous about Gansey knits,” said David severely, possibly due to the fact that he was currently wearing one in a tasteful and flattering shade of charcoal gray.

Readers should read this book….

if they like stories that make them use their imagination a little.

What are you currently working on? What other releases do you have in the works?

I’m working on another queer romance, this time about a self-absorbed influencer who offends a sorceress and is cursed with ice magic to punish him for his cold heart. In an effort to break the curse, he begins volunteering at a shelter for magical animals, where he unexpectedly begins to fall for his mild-mannered coworker, but he’ll have to reach a new understanding of himself and reevaluate how he treats others if he wants to have a chance at love before the curse takes permanent effect.
 

Thanks for blogging at HJ!

Giveaway: A print copy of INTO THE MIDNIGHT WOOD by Alexandra McCollum

To enter Giveaway: Please complete the Rafflecopter form and Post a comment to this Q: Based on this passage, what do you think of the Midnight Wood? Is it a place you’d like to visit? Why or why not?

Excerpt from Into the Midnight Wood:

Although the sky had been bright and clear on the footpath only yards away, inside the Midnight Wood it was dark as night.
That was because it was night.
It was always night in the Midnight Wood. Time moved differently there; hours could go by inside the Wood while mere moments had passed outside its boundaries, and vice versa. It was darker even than in the true nighttime, as the moon had not yet risen, though a sprinkling of stars against the black velvet sky illuminated the scene below.
Though it was nearly as bad as David remembered from the very few—and brief—occasions upon which he’d entered the Wood in the past, he had to admit there was a strange kind of beauty to his surroundings. Hemlocks and balsam firs and white pines towered overhead; the still-bare branches of birches and tulip poplars and black walnuts stretched toward the night sky. Massive outcroppings of lichen-encrusted rock punctuated the rolling hills.
The place was permeated by the dank, herbaceous scent of loam and poison plants. Eerie birdcalls echoed through the darkness, answered by the shrill and dreadful chirpings of night creatures lower to the ground.
Despite the darkness, Meredith seemed to find his way by effortless instinct, taking circuitous routes to avoid treading on flowering plants. David kept close behind him.
“So,” he couldn’t help asking, “you and Mrs. Jupiter, then?”
“Oh, yeah, last night she took me out into the back garden and—well, I tell you, afterwards I didn’t know which way was up.” Then Meredith took on a furtive look. “Only don’t tell anybody about that. It’s a secret.”
“You’ve just told me,” David pointed out.
“Yeah, but you and me, we tell each other all our secrets.”
“Do we,” said David.
“Nearly,” said Meredith, and fell back to walk alongside David, linking one arm through his.
“You’re clinging again.”
“I’m cold.”
“It’s not my fault you didn’t dress properly.”
“I dress more properly than anyone,” proclaimed Meredith, but released David as the path narrowed, forcing them back into single file as it wound its way through a dense thicket of brambles.
A screech sounded in the nearby treetops, and a shadow swept past unseen with a swish of bat-like wings.
David shuddered. “I can’t imagine how you go walking about in here on your own, or why you’d want to.”
“It’s a good place to meet people,” said Meredith with a shrug. “A while back, for instance, I stumbled upon a group of sycamore dryads up on the hilltop there. And dryads, you know, they’re quite skittish at first, not that one can blame them, but in the end, we had quite a nice time together.”
David had the horrible suspicion this was a euphemism. “You don’t mean to say—?”
“Well, you see,” said Meredith, ducking under a low branch, “they were having a bit of a get-
together, and once we got to talking, they invited me to join them, and one thing led to another—”
“You mean to tell me,” said David, having to step well out of his own path to bypass the same branch, “you come skulking around here nights on the off chance you could have your way with a wood nymph?”
#18: He has been consorting with the sycamore dryads in the Midnight Wood.
“Oh, hardly that! Besides, if anything, it was the whole lot of them who had their way with me. Not that I’m complaining, mind you.”
“I do not wish to know of your sordid entanglements with the sycamore dryads.”
“All right,” agreed Meredith. “All right. Forget the dryads. There are plenty of other nice people here. Like the Moon Calf and the Night Horse, they have a lovely little cottage together just the other side of that ridge.”
“Do they.”
#19: One can never tell when he’s being serious and when he’s completely making things up.
“They do, they invited me to tea only last week.”

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
 
 

Book Info:

A whimsical queer romance about two mismatched roommates whose fragile—and definitely not romantic at all—balance is upended by an impending family wedding and an otherworldly danger in the nearby enchanted wood.

There are at least 100 things wrong with Meredith Schwarzwelder. In fact, keeping track of these things is the only way David Carew has managed to remain living with him for as long as he has. Meredith is an irredeemable eccentric who flirts with everyone in his path (#3 on the list), cries at anything (#35), makes the worst coffee in the world (#70), and talks to mice, or imagines he does (#50).

It’s bad enough living with such a person on the edge of the Midnight Wood, but when magic starts to seep from the wood and a dark being emerges with a sinister plan involving Meredith, David decides that it’s time to leave the cottage, and his roommate, behind. Then Meredith’s brother gets engaged to the daughter of David’s boss, and David sees an opportunity: If he can insert himself into the festivities, maybe he can advance his career and get himself out of a personal rut.

With wedding bells sounding and the dangers of the Midnight Wood encroaching, David realizes there’s much more hiding beneath the surface of his roommate’s seemingly carefree charm, and that perhaps his own exasperation carries more fondness than he’d like to admit.

Cozy, sharp, steamy, and poignant, Into the Midnight Wood is a contemporary queer fairy tale about the masks we wear, the stories we tell, and the powerful need for true, honest connection to heal old wounds and new.
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Meet the Author:

Alexandra McCollum grew up in rural northeast Ohio and now lives in Nevada with their husband and dog. Among other jobs, they’ve worked in a bakery in Austria, managed a coffee shop in Ohio, and taught high school in Las Vegas. When not writing, they can be found studying languages and exploring local coffeehouses in search of the perfect americano.
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