Mia's Taboo (The Lines Trilogy Book 1)

"Some relationships don't fit neatly into the space other people leave for them. The Lines Trilogy follows Mia and Joe through the joy, the cost, and the quiet courage of choosing each other anyway."

Her mum used to date him.

That's the part Mia doesn't mention when she tells people about Joe, the controlled, quietly commanding man who came back into her life on a Tuesday night and hasn't really left since.

She's twenty-three. He's older. The history is complicated. What happens next is not.

What unfolds between them is unexpected, intense, and entirely theirs, if they can navigate everything and everyone standing between them and something real.

A burning contemporary romance that gets the heart fluttering!

Mia's Taboo: The Lines Trilogy Book I, is a story about Mia, a young, coming-of-age woman, who is contacted by Joe, a man she once knew as a teen, a man who in fact had a short relationship with her mother. The encounter starts softly, delicately, but soon, Mia finds herself engulfed in Joe's world, one where he opens the door to passion and an exploration into her sexual side which draws her ever deeper - stepping across boundaries she never knew she could, or would. Bordering on erotic, the story actually skirts that edge and is more about their unique relationship. As the bonds between them grow stronger and stronger, Joe must come to terms with his own vulnerability, his own demons. The author deftly draws the reader down the rabbit-hole, a story that vacillates between reality and fantasy, but one that will definitely get your heart fluttering and draw you deeper into this burning romance, appropriately labelled Mia's Taboo.

Book II in the series, Reckoning with Demons is already released, and Book III Behind the Lines is coming soon.

Review by International Writers Inspiring Change

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/696416_ad7569713eec42899b418d3e64bb44e1/1080p/mp4/file.mp4

Interview with Joel Hicks...

I didn't grow up in a house where writing was unusual. Quite the opposite. Writing was everywhere.

My father was a literature lecturer at the University of York and a specialist in Dante. He wrote his PhD at Cambridge and continued writing throughout his life — academic work, essays, lectures, poetry and countless pages of notes. My mother was an English teacher. She has told me about her spending weeks proofreading dad's pages. Books, language, and literature were simply part of the air in our home. My brother later followed a similar path and has written many books of his own.

Given that background, you might expect that writing fiction would have come naturally to me.

It didn't.

In fact, I spent most of my life quietly avoiding it.

Part of the reason, I suspect, goes back to something I remember very clearly from childhood. In my father's study there were boxes — literally boxes — filled with handwritten and typed pages. Drafts, notes, revisions, manuscripts. These were the working papers behind his PhD and other writing projects. As a child I remember being slightly awed by them, but also intimidated. The sheer volume of work involved in producing a book seemed enormous. Somewhere in my mind I formed the idea that writing a book was something almost impossibly large — something that took years of solitary effort and endless stacks of paper.

So, I took a different path.

My career moved toward technology: IT systems development, problem-solving, building things that functioned. Outside work my interests were always hands-on — mechanics, engineering, motorcycles, projects where you could see and touch the result of what you had built. I wrote constantly, but in a very different way: technical manuals, newsletters, articles, documentation. Practical writing with a purpose.

Fiction, however, remained something I admired from a distance.

Another important influence in my life was Italy. I moved here around twenty-five years ago, but the seeds were planted much earlier during family holidays in the 1970s and 80s. My father's love of Italian culture was infectious. As a Dante scholar he had a deep connection to the language, art, and architecture of Italy, and those interests filtered naturally into family life. Over time the place became part of my own story, and eventually I made the decision to move here permanently.

Strangely enough, it was technology — the very field that had kept me away from fiction — that finally made writing a novel feel possible.

Modern tools dramatically reduce the physical friction of writing. Drafting, editing, re-organizing chapters, tracking ideas — all of it can now happen fluidly. The intimidating image of boxes filled with thousands of typed pages no longer applies. The barrier that had existed in my mind for decades simply disappeared.

Once that happened, something interesting occurred: all those years of writing technical material turned out to be preparation rather than a detour. Writing clearly, structuring ideas, explaining complex things — those skills transfer surprisingly well to storytelling.

Fiction is still new territory for me, but perhaps that's part of the appeal. Starting something creative later in life brings a different perspective. You carry decades of experience, observation, mistakes, and curiosity with you. All of that inevitably finds its way into the story.

The novels I'm currently working on are an unconventional romance — a story about connection, boundaries, and the complicated ways people find each other. It's not the sort of book I would have expected to write earlier in life. But perhaps that's exactly why it feels interesting now.

Looking back, it seems that writing was always somewhere in the background of my life. It just took me a little longer than most to recognize it.

iWIC: What inspired you to write?

Joel: As I mention above, writing was a fact of life when/where I grew up. I just was scared of doing it. I don’t know if my writing is any good. My harshest critic is my family. I haven’t forced them to read it!

iWIC: Who or what most inspired you in life?

Joel: Too many people to list. Family, close and further afield. In the last few years I have worked out what would have been good to know 30 years ago. If you want to do something. Do it. I thought about it a lot, never tried because I didn’t think I could get through writing something from start to finish. I am now half way through the third (final)  book of this series, and it hasn’t been difficult. It takes time and that we get for free.

iWIC: What do you hope to inspire with your writing?

Joel: Anyone who wonders if they could do it. Yes you can is the answer 

iWIC: What is the backstory to your book? How did it come about?

Joel: Some of it is close to my life, it is not a biography but some parts are a lot more real than people might think. I will let you guess at which parts. I have read books, some good, some less, so that claim to be realistic, mine is.

Author website