Kay Decker: Off the Record

Kat Decker--Off the Record - Story 1 - The InternshipOff the Record is a collection of three short stories–“The Internship”, “The Overachiever”, and “After Hours”–featuring journalists and interns. After reading three of her novel-length stories, these didn’t do much for me. They weren’t bad, but I think she does better when her stories have room to breathe. Or perhaps I’m just greedy and only want more of her work to indulge in.

I don’t have much to say about the stories, though I think they are worth the read, but that doesn’t mean I don have anything to say at all.

Kay Decker also writes under the name Kay Simone (You’re the One That I Want, One Giant Leap, and The Aftermath). Under Decker she wrote she also wrote a couple other things that I don’t know if I’m going to get into; one is M/F and I’m really not interested, and the other one is M/M, a politician and a bodyguard. At the end of the third story in that series there’s double penetration. Don’t know how I feel about that. Not that I’ve never encountered it, but I never knew going in and I think I’d rather be surprised by that kind of thing… That seems strange, doesn’t it?

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Kat Decker--Off the Record - Story 2 - The Overachiever

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Kat Decker--Off the Record - Story 3 - After Hours

[/twocol_one_last]Anyway, one of the things about Off the Record is that a lot of the names are very familiar from her Simone stories. There is Robby and Matt (“The Overachiever”) and Iain and Dale (“After Hours”) who are characters in You’re the One That I Want. Their personalities were also familiar–not exact, though, but easy enough to identify. There was also Max and Kent (“The Internship”) whose names didn’t initially pop any corks for me, but that was because they were part of a couple. However, Max is one of the college bus boys in You’re the One That I Want and Kent, his last name is Rhodes which is the same as Daniel Rhodes who is one of the leads in The Aftermath. Also, personality and circumstance-wise, the Max/Kent and Will/Daniel pairings were similar. Both Max and Will could be seen as kind of gruff (Max, especially) or, at the very least, difficult to approach, though for different reasons. They also had at least one arm that was tattooed down to their hands and neither fit the typical look for their job. Kent and Daniel were both enthusiastic about the subject that connected them to their co-lead, though Daniel had to grow into his awareness. Circumstance-wise it was a matter of Max/Will being older than and in a position of authority over Kent/Daniel and how a relationship between them would be seriously frowned upon by the powers that be. I know the short stories were released before the novels (only by a couple months), but I’m going to assume that they were written before them as well.

I thought overlap/inspiration was really cute.

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