Nerds Like It Hot

As the sole witness to a mob-related murder, mousy makeup artist Gillian McCormick needs to disappear if she wants to stay alive. With the help of her octogenarian film star friend Cora Bledsoe, Gillian transforms into a Marilyn Monroe look-alike and books passage on a Nerd cruise headed for Mexico. She also brings along backup; P.I. Lex Manchester and his partner Dante Fiorello, who agree to work undercover as nerds to protect Gillian until the cruise docks.

But once aboard ship, things are far from simple. The cruise is loaded with unusual and suspicious characters, from lusty nerds to cross-dressers, making it nearly impossible to identify a real threat. And when things begin to heat up between Gillian and Lex, will he be able to keep her safe when all he wants to do is keep her for himself?

“And speaking of thinking, can you start putting your brain in gear before you open your mouth?”
“Yeah, that was bad when I alluded to her getting dead."

Cruising for a Title

If there’s such a thing as a cruise bunny, that would be me. I love everything about cruising – the ship, the hunky deck hands, the water, the hunky deck hands, the midnight buffets, the hunky deck hands . . . . they’re not so far removed from that pirate fantasy we all love, are they? Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom, anyone?

Obviously sex and ships go together in my mind, so what better spot to set my latest nerd book? I pictured a sort of Love Boat Goes Nerdy scenario, and voila!

Okay, it didn’t go quite like that. What really happened is this – my editor came up with the title Nerds Like It Hot and asked me to write a story to go with it. Yikes.

Forget all that stuff about a plot that wouldn’t leave me alone or characters that intruded on my dreams. This book started with a title. There was precedent for that, because Nerd in Shining Armor, my first nerd book and the one that Kelly Ripa featured on her book club, started with a title, and that worked out fine.

Because the new title came from the golden oldie Some Like It Hot, I thought it would be fun to echo some of the elements in the movie. For those who’ve forgotten (I had to re-watch it, myself), Marilyn Monroe’s a singer in a girl band, and Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon disguise themselves as girl musicians and head to Florida with the band in order to escape the clutches of the mob.

So in Nerds Like It Hot, my mousy heroine Gillian is on the run from the mob, disguises herself as a Marilyn look-alike, and hops on a Mexican Riviera cruise in August. Believe you me, it is HOT in Mexico in August. But hot means you wear less clothes, so I didn’t have to spend paragraphs undressing my characters. A couple of snaps and buttons, and they were good to go.

I also put Tony Curtis in the book as the hero’s sidekick Dante, but for my hero Lex, I needed somebody way sexier than Jack Lemmon. (Sorry, Jack.) The name’s kinda close . . . does Hugh Jackman fit the bill for most of you? I thought so. There’s also a cross-dresser, and much more sex than in the movie, which had like zero sex except for one make-out scene between Marilyn and Tony.

I have to say that starting out with a title and no story wasn’t as scary as it seemed when my editor first threw it at me. She also saved me the angst that comes when you’ve finished a book and still don’t know what to call the darned thing. Unfortunately, out of the eighty-something books I’ve written, I’ve only managed to think up about three of the titles myself. Anyone know where I can buy some shiny new titles?