Some Love Lasts and Getting to Yes Book Tour

A hurricane. A first glance across a room. In Some Love Lasts and Getting to Yes, Tim Hunniecutt follows two young people at pivotal moments, tracing how courage, vulnerability, and timing shape the way love is remembered.

Some Love Lasts

Fourteen-year-old Madi expects a quiet stay filled with reading and reflection. Instead, she finds herself drawn to Matthew, the older neighbor known for his lifeguard strength and quiet bravery. Admired by many, he seems distant until he begins to notice her in a way that feels personal and transformative.

Their bond grows beneath the rising heat of summer, shifting from fascination to something deeper and more consuming. When a violent hurricane strikes the coast, Matthew risks everything in a rescue that permanently alters Madi’s understanding of devotion. The act defines her sense of love long after the season ends. Years later, a reunion in college forces them to confront what remains between them and whether a connection forged in youth can survive time apart.

Getting to Yes

Nineteen-year-old Chris enters adulthood determined to understand love on his own terms. Through a series of relationships, he navigates attraction, missteps, and emotional awakening. Told from his perspective, the story unfolds through candid and often humorous recollections of women who leave lasting impressions.

Each experience teaches him something about vulnerability and responsibility. He begins to see patterns in his desires and his hesitations. Then he meets Chloe, and the shift feels undeniable. Their connection challenges him to consider whether he is ready to move beyond fleeting encounters. What follows is a reflective exploration of innocence, heartbreak, and the hope that sustains someone learning how to commit to something real.

 

Author Interview

What’s a detail, theme, or clue in your book that most readers might miss on the first read—but you secretly hope someone notices?

Getting to Yes: When the male lead summarizes his problem as “I felt too much and said too little.” It’s a one line description of the entire book.

Some Love Lasts: When Dean the head lifeguard makes a comment when he meets Madi that “Matthew had succumbed to another girl.” A big clue that despite Matthew’s protestations about the girls following him, he obviously enjoyed some of them. He’s not quite so perfect as he seems and innocent Madi completely misses this comment. It’s a foreshadowing of his character when they meet again in college. It’s his fundamental challenge to accept the love given him. Only a near death experience causes him to finally realize what his and her love really means.   

 

When did this story or idea “click” into place for you—was there a single moment you knew you had to write it?

Getting to Yes: I had long thought about using the subject matter for this novel, but had never been able to think about how to frame it and end it. One day, I was thinking about it, and the solution came to me. I started writing the novel the next day. 

Some Love Lasts: I was thinking of a backstory for another novel centered around the hurricane and the rescue, when the story of this girl came into dazzling focus. An image popped into my head of her standing in the road, covered in blood, in the hot Florida afternoon, having just saved the man she loved, who had saved her as a teenager.  I knew I needed to tell her story. 

 

Which character or real-life person surprised you the most while writing this book, and why?

Getting to Yes: When Chris realizes his relationship with Colleen imploded because he failed to tell her how intense his feelings for her had become. He had denied to himself what he really felt and his realization that failure to communicate leads him to sharing with Chloe too soon which causes him a new set of problems that sets up the whole last part of the novel. 

Some Love Lasts: Madi’s mother, Elizabeth. As the story progressed, I was surprised at how Elizabeth’s strength had come from overcoming trauma, and that experience caused her to show her daughter tenderness when she needed it most. Madi inherited more than her looks from her mother. She also got her mental toughness. 

 

If your book had a soundtrack, what three songs would be on it and what scenes or moments would they pair with?

Getting to Yes: 

• “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You” by Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. It’s the perfect backdrop to when Chris first meets Chloe. 
• “Dancing in the Moonlight” by King Harvest. It goes great with Chris’s confession to Chloe standing in the woods in the moonlight. 
• “Come and Get Your Love” by Redbone. It pairs with Chloe’s confession of her feelings to Chris. 

Some Love Lasts:

• “Kiss Me” by Sixpence None the Richer, when Matthew first kisses Madi.
• “Everybody’s Gotta to Learn Sometime” by Beck, when Matthew walks Madi home after she rejected his attempt at seduction when they first meet again at FSU. 
• “Walking on Sunshine” by Katrina and the Waves, when Matthew and Madi confess their feelings to each other the second time around when they’re students at FSU. 

 

What’s one belief, question, or emotional truth you hope readers carry with them long after they finish your book?

Getting to Yes: Despite his rejections and heartbreaks the male lead never stops trying until he finds his love. It all starts by trying.

Some Love Lasts: Love is more than an emotion. A lot of this book is an attempt to illustrate what that “more” means. 

 

If your protagonist (or the central figure in your nonfiction) could give the reader one piece of advice, what would it be?

Getting to Yes: Choose love. It can and will change your life for the better.

Some Love Lasts: Love takes courage, and it takes even more courage when you find love to embrace it and change yourself to keep it. 

 

What real-world place, object, or memory helped shape a key element in your book?

Getting to Yes: Remembering and using some of the dates I went on with the girl who became my wife. I was surprised by how much detail about those dates I did fondly recall. They provided a real world feel for Chloe’s and Chris’s initial dates.

Some Love Lasts: Seeing my younger brother being saved from drowning by a lifeguard. I was around seven years old, and he was only four.  My mother had lagged behind us, carrying my youngest brother, who was still a toddler. None of us kids knew how to swim. I stood there frozen as my brother recklessly plunged into the water until it was over his head, and down he went. A lifeguard ran right past me, dived into the water, and pulled him out, all before my mother ever even reached us. 

 

What’s something you had to research, learn, or experience to write this book that genuinely shocked you?

Getting to Yes: Researching locations on the FSU campus, I was shocked to find out they had built a new dorm named Magnolia in what had been a parking lot when I attended. The original Magnolia dorm I lived in, featured in the book, had been torn down in the late seventies. I was startled to see a new dorm with the old name.

Some Love Lasts: The staggering variety of Greek pastries. I’m a fan of Greek food and pastries, but had no idea how much more was out there I had yet to try. 

 

 

About the Author

Tim Hunniecutt has loved words since childhood, writing poems and stories for family and friends from an early age. Lifeguards have played a meaningful role in his life, from the rescue of his younger brother to several of his own children who later worked as lifeguards. He studied psychology and English at Florida State University, where the emotional spark for this story began after he fell in love during his first summer home from school. He now lives in Lithia, Florida, with that same girl, now his wife, and enjoys traveling, escape games, ballroom dancing with her, and time with his grandchildren.

Visit Tim at his website and on Facebook.

 

SOME LOVE LASTS

Amazon: https://bit.ly/3O8WR2B

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/247148054-some-love-lasts

 

GETTING TO YES

Amazon: https://amzn.to/3NmPnWK

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/201540770-getting-to-yes

 

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