Tag: The Girl Most Likely To

My second fraternity novel went through two name changes before we found one the publisher liked enough to use–and it was their idea.

It was originally called beautiful, which is what I called it while writing the first draft. Kensington did not like that title, and wanted something that would tie it more to the first fraternity erotica novel I wrote for them. I tweaked the title of the first one and came up with What Every Frat Boy Wants, which isn’t really a bad title at all. But at some point Marketing came up with Games Frat Boys Play–which was not only a better title over all but also fit the story better–I didn’t fight the name change at all. (It rather bothers me that I’ve never been able to come up with a good title for a single one of the Todd Gregory novels, to be honest. I take pride in being good at titles…)

When I was very very young I saw a made for TV movie that I absolutely loved. It was a twisted and funny revenge tale called The Girl Most Likely To, and it was Stockard Channing’s first big break in film or television. She played an unattractive, overweight young woman who was also socially awkward and had no friends; she was lonely and made fun of and picked on her entire life. She spent all of her time studying and as such became extremely smart. But when she went off to college she thought she had friends and she thought she could be happy–only to wind up betrayed and humiliated by everyone publicly. She flees in tears and is in a horrible car wreck, which leaves her in a coma. When she comes out of the coma, it’s been months; they reconstructed her face and not knowing what she looked like, followed her bone structure and made her beautiful; and the liquid diet while in the coma had shed weight off her and now she’s gorgeous…

..and she decides to get even with everyone who fucked her over and humiliated her. Joan Rivers wrote the script, so it was twisted and dark yet funny at the same time; and Channing was amazing–I’ve been a fan ever since. I love me a good revenge story, so when Kensington wanted another fratboy book I decided to go for a revenge story–I love a good revenge story, like I said (the television series Revenge is one of my all time favorites) and I decided to do a The Gay Most Likely To, only making my main character remarkably sweet and innocent and charming; his father is a software millionaire and he spent most of his life at a boarding school in Switzerland where everyone was a snob and was shitty to him for not having a title or being old aristocratic money, and he’s decided he wants to have a normal life at a normal college before going off to Harvard–he’s also incredibly smart–and literally picked CSU-Polk out of the air as his choice. Also looking to explore his sexuality, he moves into a really nice apartment in a great (and expensive) complex, and across the breezeway from him lives Jeff and Blair from Every Frat Boy Wants It, who are the ones who get him to go to the Beta Kappa fraternity rush and…the story was off and running.

Kensington also came up with a fucking smoking hot cover for the book.

This, reflected Police Detective Joe Palladino, is an awfully nice apartment complex for a college student to be living in. How the hell does he afford it?

The Alhambra Apartments, he knew, started at a mere $1500 per month for a studio, and went up—way up—from there. When they’d opened a few years earlier, his then-boyfriend, Sean, had wanted to take a look at them.  Joe had failed to see the point—there was no way they could afford the rents there, even with their combined incomes—but Sean had insisted and it was easier to give in than have an argument. And yes, the place was gorgeous—you had to be let in by security, there were fountains and tennis courts and swimming pools conveniently placed throughout the complex. Each building had a laundry facility, and near the clubhouse was an on-site laundry dry cleaner. There was even a fully equipped workout facility with state of the art equipment that put Joe’s gym to shame. The apartments themselves were large, full of light and luxurious—but after the tour, Sean had pouted all night long because they couldn’t afford to live there, as though it were somehow Joe’s fault. But everything had always been Joe’s fault, which was why he’d dumped Sean shortly after that. There was, after all, only so much complaining that anyone can put up with. Sean wanted everything but didn’t want to work for it—and Joe eventually tired of being compared to Sean’s previous, much older boyfriend and being found wanting. Sean was young and handsome—and so thought everything should be handed to him. He didn’t like having to work, and he didn’t like that Joe’s income wasn’t enough for him to live a life of luxury and idleness while being supported.

“I don’t know what you ever saw in him in the first place,” his older sister Margie had sniffed in her patented condescending way after Sean had left him. “He has about as much depth as a dog dish.”

He’d opened his mouth to answer her but had closed it again. There wasn’t any point in arguing with her because she was right. Sean had always wanted more than Joe could offer him. The three bedroom house in the subdivision on the north side of town hadn’t been enough for him. He always wanted the most expensive things—a car he couldn’t possibly afford, the most expensive clothes and colognes and vacations. Joe had practically bankrupted himself trying to please Sean—but nothing was ever enough. And besides, Margie wouldn’t understand even if he tried to explain how his heart had always swelled up whenever he looked at Sean—or that just touching Sean’s skin had gotten him aroused. It had taken him a while to understand it all himself, but the truth was he’d really loved the way Sean looked, and hoped his love would change Sean somehow.

But, he reflected again, people only change if they want to. And you can’t build a relationship on sex when you have nothing else in common.

It was a hard lesson to learn. And while he’d never admit to anyone—least of all Margie—he still hoped Sean might come back home someday.

I think unrequited love is something that most can identify with; I feel it is fairly safe to say that almost all of us have, at one time or another over the course of our lives, loved or liked or desired someone who would never be interested in us for whatever reason; whether they are out of our league or we aren’t their type or they just don’t feel the same way. It’s awful, it hurts and it sucks, but you really don’t have any choice but to move on and forget about it. I’ve certainly been in that situation, and that sort of rejection really stings; it gets to you on a profoundly painful level. But what if the person you had feelings for knew you had those feelings, didn’t reciprocate, but thought it would be fun to string you along and make you think you had a chance, that it would all work out at some point, just not now–and mocked you behind your back, and so forth. And what if you were a extremely lonely and sheltered (although rich and incredibly smart) and socially backward person, naïvely trusting and expecting everyone to be kind because, well, why would anyone want to be unkind?

(I was recently laughing about my own naivete with my dad. “I always think people are telling me the truth,” I said, “because it never occurs to me that people will lie even when they have no reason to.” I like to think I’m more skeptical now than I was when I was younger, but every once in awhile I get a reminder that people will lie sometimes even when there’s not a reason to do so)

I found myself really liking my character as I wrote more about him, and really absolutely hating his nemesis; he finds out he’s being made a fool of about halfway through the book, and that’s when he launches his scheme for revenge, which results in an accident that may not have been an accident, hence our police detective in the opening. And yes, there’s a lot of sex in the book; it’s an erotic novel, after all, so there needs to be some sex in it. The book did really well and I am also rather proud of it, because I think I did a good job with it.