Blog Tour: Love Under Two Outcasts by Cara Covington

Girl, that coat rules!

Please welcome Cara Covington, author of Love Under Two Outcasts!


Cara will be awarding a $25 Bookstrand giftcard to a randomly drawn winner via Rafflecopter during the tour, and a $10 Amazon or Barnes/Noble giftcard to a randomly drawn host.

Click here to win the $25 Bookstrand gift card- a Rafflecopter giveaway.

1. Tell us a little about yourself; your hometown, your age, anything cool!

I’m from a rural community in southern Ontario, Canada called Flamborough. I turned 60 on my last birthday. I’ve been married for 42 years to my High School sweetheart. We’re parents, grandparents of 6, and great-grandparents of 2. Cool? I think the fact that I had to retire from work when I had open heart surgery at the age of 48, and then went on to live my dream of becoming a published author is as cool as it gets. Some days, I have to pinch myself! 

2. How did you know you wanted to write?

I began to write when I was around 8 or 9. Picking up a pen was just something that came naturally to me. My father passed away when I was 7 and it wasn’t until much later that I learned that he, when he’d been younger, had always, always had a pad of paper and a pencil in his pocket, as he was a writer, too. In fact, I discovered not that many years ago, that my brother had a few of his poems and stories tucked away. So I guess you could say that for me, writing is in the blood.

3. What inspires you to write on those inevitable rough days?

I remind myself, on those rare days when I don’t feel like writing but I know I must, that there are readers waiting to read my next book. Just lately, I only have to turn my head to the left to see a picture—my street team sent me an enormous picture frame with their photos pasted inside it. All those beautiful smiling women who treasure my books! Can you imagine it? That’s reason enough for any writer to get back to work.

4. Tell me some of your current projects- Your works in progress, ideas, or any crazy, off the wall things.

 The Lusty Texas series began with two historical novels, set in Texas in the 1880s. The series then jumped to contemporary times, as the heroes and heroines, descendants of the characters in the historical novels, clamored to have their stories told. Some people would say that having a series that already expands beyond 24 books is crazy! My December 2014 release, Love Under Two Outcasts was book 24 in the series; the next one, A Very Lusty New Year, released January 23rd was the 25th book in the series. And as I am writing this in January, I can tell you that I am working on Love Under Two Extroverts, book 26, and I expect a late March release date for it.

5. What would you like people to know about your work?

I write erotic romantic fiction. Some, under my pen name Morgan Ashbury, but lately, as Cara Covington. My stories are entertainment, mostly—a place for readers to escape from their every day trials and tribulations. A place they can visit and bask in my ideal of small town life. Where your neighbors care about you, and where you soon find that you belong.Within the pages of a Lusty, Texas book, you may find a few hugs for your heart – that was the way one reader described my stories, and nothing has ever touched me as deeply as that.

6. This is a chance to meander or talk in greater depth if you like. Here you can talk about what hobbies you pursue, how you refresh your well of ideas, what you would recommend to other writers.

I’m afraid I don’t have any exciting hobbies; I’m limited, mobility-wise, but my husband and I have traveled a great deal throughout North America over the last few years. We’ve been on several cruises, as well as having visited some vastly different cities from New York to Dallas, Chicago to New Orleans, to Anaheim and Orlando and Daytona Beach.

I love to read, of course, and some of my favorite authors are also friends: Heather Rainier, D. B. Reynolds, Emma Wildes, and Kelley Armstrong to name a few. I also love to read Nora Roberts/J D Robb, Julie Garwood, Catherine Coulter, Barbara Delinsky and Linda Howard. I have 2 surviving children, 6 surviving grand-children and 2 great-grandchildren. Life in the Ashbury household can be very hectic. We have a cat who adopted us and has graciously allowed us to stay in the house, and a Morky dog who is most definitely a spoiled little fur baby.

My advice to my fellow authors: if you are not yet published, do not quit. If you want it bad enough, keep working at it and do not quit. Just write and write and write some more. Believe in yourself; make your craft excellent; and you will get published. If you are published, I have a word of advice for you, too—because I’m 60, you see, and feel entitled to give a bit of that prickly commodity now and again.

Please, remember that once you put it out there on the web, it is there, forever. So try to remember that whatever you do, your readers are watching you. Be the best you that you can be.

And now, Love Under Two Outcasts!

Charlotta Carmichael is mostly not ashamed of the way she paid for her college degree. Mostly. As an exotic dancer at a gentlemen’s club, she earned enough to get her degree in psychology. But sometimes the scorn she’s suffered in the past comes back to haunt her. She fears a similar reaction from Jesse and Barry Benedict. Will they still think she’s good enough for them if she tells them the truth?

Jesse and Barry know all about past mistakes and regret. Feeling like outcasts, they left their Montana home and headed to Lusty, hoping to make a new start. Once they understand that Charlotta is their soul mate, they confess their sins of the past—because they want their relationship to have a solid foundation.

As Jesse and Barry rush to save Charlotta from a stalker, they all soon learn that moving on is easier said than done—and requires a bigger leap of faith than they’d ever imagined.

Appetite whetted? Here's a teaser.

The sound of high heels on the marble floor echoed in the reception area. Jesse realized belatedly the feminine footsteps were coming their way.

“Gentlemen, I apologize for keeping you waiting.”

Jesse knew the voice from the two telephone conversations he’d had with the doctor. He looked up—and had the surreal sensation that in that instant, with that simple tilt of his head, his entire life had just changed. One quick glance over at Barry, and he knew his twin was experiencing his own personal epiphany.

Jesse got to his feet, his gaze taking in her piled high blonde hair, soft grey eyes, and the way her beige silk blouse and trim brown skirt displayed her made-for-sin body.

He met her gaze, pleased when he read in hers that he and his brother weren’t the only ones to get gob smacked with a flood of pheromones.

She’d extended her hand and Jesse wasted no time in clasping it in his. The zing of electricity shot straight to his groin, and it took supreme will to keep his wood from tenting his jeans.

“I’m Jesse. And you have no need to apologize, ma’am. We’re here at your service.” He saw the double entendre hit its mark and liked the humor he read in her eyes.

And then he appreciated her ability to give as well as she got, when she said, “Well in that case, please follow me to someplace a little more private.”

 

Website:http://www.morganashbury.com

Morgan’s books at Siren-Bookstrand:

http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury

Cara’s Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Cara-Covington/616302148428229

Virtual Book Tour: Bob at the Lake by R. Murphy

Please welcome R. Murphy to this stop on her blog tour!

  Before we get started, go here to
enter to win a $25 Amazon Gift Card

On to Bob At The Lake!

Blurb:

Take a crabby woman of a certain age, move her to the wintry shores of a New York lake, and then throw in a martini-loving ghost from 1920s Manhattan. Last, stir in the good-looking grape grower who lives up the hill. Now there’s a recipe for a potent screwball cocktail!

Excerpt:

Bob, [my new ghost], looked around at my quiet, carton-filled house. “But don’t you think you’ll ever get lonely way out here? You might miss having a man around.”

“Well,” I responded, “I’m human, so of course I’d like to have a guy around on a regular basis. But by the time you get to be my age most of the good guys are taken. My grandmother used to say, ‘It takes a very good man to be better than none.’ She was right. If I can’t find a good guy, I’m not going to waste my time and energy on a fixer-upper. You know what they say about teaching a pig to sing.”

“Huh?” he replied, bewildered.

“You know, ‘You can’t teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time, and it annoys the pig.’ I feel the same way about spending my time with an inappropriate man. I’m sure they’re all fine, they just don’t have what’s right for me. I’m tired of pretending that underneath all the nuttiness, I’m not smart and competent. I just don’t feel like putting on the ‘Love me, oh, please, love me’ song and dance routine anymore.”

“Good one about the pig. I should jot that down.”

“Feel free.”

Thus began months of the strangest dinner conversations I could ever imagine. Topics ranged from the sex life of newts to the menace of buttered toast. We spent several days talking about Bob’s bone dust theory (he believed the kind of person you were was determined by the amount of bone dust in your body). I started buying my semi-dry riesling by the case and developed a taste for very dry martinis. Half of our dinners wound up with me yelling, throwing my hands in the air, and storming out of the kitchen. The other half ended with us laughing so hard tears streamed out of my eyes. What a blast.
 

Author Interview

Linda, thanks so much for inviting me to join you today. I’ve been having so much fun meeting readers on my blog tour. It’s been a delight!

1.    Tell us a little about yourself: Your hometown, your age, anything cool! Brooklyn-born and Jersey-bred. Does it get any better than that?

2.      How did you know you wanted to write? I come from a long line of readers. In fact, in my family, we call reading ‘The Murphy Curse.’ Dishes and laundry go unwashed, homework goes undone, bills go unpaid, all as we breathlessly try to cram in ‘just to the end of this chapter.‘  Although I made my living as a business writer for decades, I would never have aspired to being a novelist; I don’t have the chutzpah. To me, being a novelist is just one small step down from being Ruler of the Universe. I hold good writers in that much esteem.

3.      What inspires you on those inevitable rough days? After years of writing to business deadlines, I still try to keep time-frames in my mind when writing fiction. So many words by such and such a date. I’ve found, though, that the worst thing you can do when you’re imagining your way through your first draft is to criticize your creation and your writing. That stops me cold every time. So I try to kill my internal editor while I’m drafting, and then bring her back to life when the rewrites start. 

4.      Tell me some of your current projects - your works in progress, ideas, or any crazy off the wall things. I’m almost finished with rewrites of the second Bob book, Bob at The Plaza, where Roz finds herself going toe-to-toe both with a flooded lake and with the ghosts of The Algonquin Round Table. It’s been quite the roller-coaster ride! As far as ‘crazy off the wall’? Right now, I’m mapping out how to rebuild my stone lake wall that was demolished by ice this spring. There’s nothing quite like standing calf-deep in frigid water to get your mind churning with writing ideas!

5.      What are the aspects of your writing that people don't see? What would you like people to know about your work? I loved doing the research that underpins the Bob books, especially reading about members of The Algonquin Round Table. The letters of Alexander Woollcott, Edna Ferber’s novels, Benchley’s essays, Harpo Marx’s hysterical autobiography--it’s been so much fun learning more about these people. As to my hands-on research on the panic of living through a spring flood? Not so much fun...

6.     This question is a chance to meander or talk in greater depth if you'd like. Here you can talk about what hobbies you pursue, how you refresh your well of ideas, what you would recommend to other writers. My hobbies--like my reading choices--are all over the map. I love grand opera; I also sort of love pushing large rocks into a lake wall under the broiling summer sun. I strive for a frugal life, but somehow there’s always money in the budget for blue pearls.

Usually unwittingly, I manage to interject lots of drama into my life. For instance, even though I’m kind of tired of cooking, I signed up for a farm share this summer, so I predict lots of sturm und drang as I try to figure out what to do with my newly-picked peck of peppers. Pickle them? (you did say I could ‘meander’…)

I guess I refresh my well of ideas through variety and pushing myself into slightly uncomfortable situations. It’s a great way to keep growing and to keep my writing fresh. (Even though I still have no clue how I will deal with all those peppers…)

Great questions, Linda! Thanks so much for inviting me today!  Roz

Roz Murphy is the pseudonym of a shy, retiring writer who doesn’t want her neighbors to know how nutty she really is. Brooklyn-born and Jersey-bred, Roz now lives on the misty shore of one of New York’s beautiful Finger Lakes. Prior to that, her business writing career took her to many locations, including Manhattan, where she worked for a number of years. As a freelance and corporate writer, Roz won several national and international writing and communications awards.

Now Roz is pursuing her first love—fiction. She’s writing the ‘Bob’ books, the humorous chronicle of a crabby ‘woman of a certain age’ who moves to the wintry shores of a New York lake—and gets a ghost. And not just any ghost, mind you. Bob’s a plump, middle-aged ghost from 1920s Manhattan who swans around in a silk smoking jacket and drinks far too many martinis. Stir the good-looking grape grower who lives up the hill into this mix and you get a pretty potent screwball cocktail!

When she’s not reading, writing, hill-walking, staring mindlessly out the window at the lake or piling rocks onto her ever-diminishing lakefront, you can usually find Roz hanging out with her family, travelling, or exploring the amazing wines and wineries of the Finger Lakes.

‘Bob at the Lake’ is exclusively available as a Kindle download from Amazon. Please join Roz Murphy Author on FaceBook for updates on the many adventures of Roz, David—and Bob.

Amazon buy link: http://www.amazon.com/Bob-at-Lake-R-Murphy-ebook/dp/B00F3O9G4Y/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1388423123&sr=1-1

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Roz-Murphy-Author/213668102110571