UPDATE: The winner is…flchen!
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Hi, everybody! My name’s Michal. What’s yours? As a lover of Stephen Sondheim musicals, I’ve always wanted to use that line from Gypsy. Not a bad intro for someone who writes short and steamy.

Silver Soldiers is my fourth Boys Behaving Badly submission. I loved the stories I contributed to Stranded, First Response, and Cowboys, but I think Silver Soldiers’ “Take Me To the Water” may be my favorite. All my stories are historicals and, with the exception of First Response‘s “The $5.00 Kiss of Life,” take place before 1900. My first story, “Put It In A Book” and my third, “The Patience of Unanswered Prayer,” also contained lite paranormal elements. But with “Take Me to the Water,” I returned to straight historical and my favorite romance trope: the second chance.

As a kid, my favorite sections in the library were biographies and history. I grew up in the 1960s when the battle cry of my generation was “Say it loud I’m Black and I’m Proud,” inspiring me to learn all I could about African-American history and African nations fighting for independence from colonialism. The activism of the Civil Rights movement also impacted my psyche and sent me in search of the history of that activism as well. I fashion my heroines on the resilient African-American women I blog about once a month on Delilah’s blog. Women who refused to let society limit them because of their gender or their race.

The stories I discovered about African-American women who both triumphed and met with tragedy color my romances so as they entertain and educate, they also break the danger-of-a-single-story cycle. I highly recommend Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED talk, “The Danger of a Single Story,” to give you an idea of what I’m talking about.

Presently, my stories take place in the North and the West and deal with the lives of African-Americans who never knew slavery as well as those who were enslaved. As my romances are steamy and/or erotic, my heroes and heroines generate plenty of physical and emotional heat. My first historical, One Breath Away, is set in the West and tells of the romance between an entrepreneurial former slave and the sailor who believes she’s his fated mate. My second, Better To Marry Than To Burn, also takes place in the West and pits an independent daughter from Philadelphia’s Black Elite against a former slave who needs a marriage of convenience.

I’ve been writing professionally now for twenty years and learn so much from reading the stories gathered in collaborations like these Boys Behaving Badly anthologies. I’m enjoying the stories in this collection as much as I have the stories in the previous ones and I know you will too.

I love reading about African-Americans in all eras, but their accomplishments and exploits during Post-Reconstruction, the Gilded Age and 1920s Paris hold the key to my history-loving heart. For a chance at a $10 Amazon gift card, share in the comments what your favorite era(s) in history are.

About the Author

Michal Scott is the erotic romance pen name of Anna Taylor Sweringen, a retired minister transplanted from NYC to Albuquerque. Between guest preaching engagements and helping a small house church stay afloat with integrity, Anna has mentored pre-published authors in Romance Writers of America’s Pen2Paper program and continues to mentor in RWA’s RAMP program as well. She’s currently adapting the stories from Richard Wagner’s opera Ring Cycle into a Gilded Age and Pre-WWI series set in New York told from the POV of African-American women. In addition to erotic romance Anna self publishes a lite paranormal second chance romance series called Haunted Harlem as Anna M. Taylor.

Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/106e6b05cdfe/michal-scotts-newsletter
Amazon Author page: https://amzn.to/2TSHzRn
Twitter:  @mscottauthor1

Her story inside Silver Soldiers: A Boys Behaving Badly Anthology is “Take Me to the Water.”

An unexpected dare holds the key to a second chance with the disgraced Buffalo soldier she’s never stopped loving.