Guest Posts

Please join me in welcoming Juliet Grey, author of Days of Splendor, Days of Sorrow,  to Peeking Between the Pages today.  I simply can’t wait to read this one as I read the first one in the trilogy called Becoming Marie Antoinette (my review) last year and loved it!  I become more and more fascinated by Marie Antoinette as I read more about her.  Today Juliet Grey joins us with a guest post entitled Gliding in Marie Antoinette’s footsteps…

 So there I was, doing the Versailles Glide in the Hall of Mirrors . . . and apart from my husband placing his cupped hand to the side of his face in an “I don’t know her” gesture—no one seemed to notice!

There are many ways to research a work of historical fiction. An author can read a gazillion biographies and articles about the era and the figures she’s writing about, whether in print or online; she can peruse their correspondence (which I used quite a bit of in my Marie Antoinette novels because letters reveal so much about character; in fact, in many cases the author of the letter would say or promise to do one thing in the correspondence and then turn around and actually do something entirely different).  The author can study photographs and paintings to get a sense of how people looked and what they wore (usually when they got dolled up for a portrait). She can visit museums to see the fashions her characters wore (and in some cases, the actual garments) as well as the home furnishings, or tour the types of buildings where they lived and worked to get a sense of the social and domestic history of her characters. If her characters are royalty or nobility, often their actual residences and castles are now museums or preserved historical sites. An author can also, if she’s a tactile or hands-on type of researcher, do some of the same things her characters did, including swordplay, donning period- accurate garments and wigs, learning the language of the fan or the snuffbox, learning and performing the popular dances of the age, and eating some of the same recipes.

I do all of the above when I write a historical novel. Part of my desire to get a fuller sense of how my characters lived by doing some of the things they did, may stem from my background as a professional actress. I was no stranger to wigs, corsets, panniers, and crinolines when I went from the stage to the page. And, as an admitted history geek and research wonk, I’ve always been fond of visiting places where my favorite historical figures lived, walked, and visited, and I’ve tried to enjoy some of their favorite pastimes. I’ve eaten in a London restaurant where Emma Hamilton frequently dined in order to soak up the atmosphere. I’ve taken a backstage tour of the Drury Lane theatre where the teenaged star of the day Mary Robinson performed in the early 1770s. But until I literally walked a mile (actually a lot more) in Marie Antoinette’s footsteps, I had less of an appreciation of life—and her life—at Versailles.

The noblewomen of the Bourbon court had a very specific way of walking (although the men, in their own two-inch heels with their red soles (where do you think Christian Louboutin got the idea?) could stride and strut about as usual. The walk was known as the Versailles Glide and it gave the impression that the women were not walking, but floating an inch or so off the highly polished parquet floor, or gliding about as if they were opulently gowned pull-toys on wheels with an unseen string pulling them forward.

For women of the court, learning to master the Versailles Glide was as important as perfecting the minuet. But for Marie Antoinette, the stakes were higher than they were for any other lady. The queen had already died; therefore, being dauphine—the wife of the heir to the throne—made Marie Antoinette, who arrived at Versailles as a fourteen-year-old Austrian outsider, the highest ranking lady in the land, even before her husband ascended the throne. Consequently, she had to look more elegant and graceful than any other woman; it would have been quite embarrassing if all these French duchesses and marquises and comtesses could perform the Versailles Glide better than she could.

If you have ever visited Versailles, you know that the château itself is vast and it’s exhausting to tour even one floor. The famous Hall of Mirrors alone is 240 feet long.

Now, imagine going from room to room throughout the day with your knees slightly bent, your heels raised off the floor a couple of inches (and the higher the shoe heel the harder this is to achieve) and all your weight on the balls of your feet as you shuffle forward without your heels ever touching the ground, still keeping your knees soft and slightly bent, all the while maintaining your elegantly regal posture—a ramrod-straight spine without tensing your neck and shoulders. Plus, you can’t look like you’re shuffling your feet or taking stuttering steps. And you can’t bounce up and down like a carousel horse, which is what your body naturally wants to do when your knees and feet are appropriately bent and your weight is pitched forward.

Add to these difficulties of maintaining an even keel: a pomaded and powdered coiffeur curled and teased sometimes three feet off your scalp with all manner of tchotchkes affixed to it or threaded through it from additional lengths of false hair to pearls and gemstones to feathered headdresses to artistic tableaux depicting a deeply personal scene for the wearer, or a current event that was the talk of
toute Paris. And don’t forget tight sleeves and heavily embellished bodices and skirts that were widened with the addition of panniers beneath them so that the woman might not fit through a doorway without turning sideways and sidling into the next room.

Of course there was no sidling with the Versailles Glide. You sailed straight ahead with your eyes up and your Watteau-style train catching a breeze when you got up to speed. As Marie Antoinette traveled with an entourage behind her, you can just picture all those rustling taffeta skirts as their wearers swished along the hallways.

As part of my research for the Marie Antoinette trilogy, I learned how to perform the Versailles Glide from Maria Zannieri, a friend in NYC who specializes in period dance choreography and who owns copies of Jean-Georges Noverre’s notes. Marie Antoinette’s formidable mother, the Austrian empress Maria Theresa, brought Noverre to Vienna from the court of Stuttgart to teach the future dauphine all of the dances that were popular at Versailles. When Marie Antoinette finally became queen she brought Noverre to Versailles as the court’s ballet master. It was quite remarkable feeling this link from Maria Theresa and Marie Antoinette through Noverre to Ms. Zannieri centuries later.

I also had a corset made for me replicating the style from 1770, the year Marie Antoinette was married, as well as other period-appropriate/accurate undergarments. And of course I walked in Marie Antoinette’s footsteps both throughout Versailles and in the city of Paris, including a visit to the gloomy Conciergerie where she was imprisoned her final months. At Versailles it seemed imperative, even though I was not of course in an 18th century costume, to mimic the Glide. Even as Maria was teaching me the technique I found it exhausting to never put my entire foot down and to keep my weight pitched forward on the balls of my feet—without looking as though I was falling forward. And keeping your knees bent the whole time is murder on your shins. By the end of ten minutes I was exhausted. So how did all these women wearing much heavier clothing (and jewelry!) than we do, and with top-heavy hairstyles and headdresses) manage to sustain the walk for several minutes at a clip in order to get from one part of the palace to the other—and—to make it seem utterly effortless?

The short answer is: I don’t know. Because I found Gliding from one end of the Hall of Mirrors to the other to be a physical challenge. I suppose one got used to it over time and built up stamina. In this case, I was happy to suffer for my art to get a true sense of how it must have felt to walk in Marie Antoinette’s shoes for a day. While I researched the changing fashions of Marie Antoinette’s life and times, including the trends she set herself—and I incorporated the backlash she received for some of her style choices as well as her extravagance into the novels in my Marie Antoinette trilogy (although I can’t think of any 17th or 18th c. French queens who dressed on a budget!)—it wasn’t until I tried to mimic the ways she achieved the standards of beauty, particularly the Versailles Glide, that were de rigueur at the French court that I came to fully appreciate the physical cost to the age-old question: “What price beauty?” and how genuinely painful it might have been to be Marie Antoinette.

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Wow Juliet, thanks so much for this fantastic guest post!  It was fascinating and I’d sure love to visit and walk in Marie Antoinette’s footsteps myself!

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About Days of Splendor, Days of Sorrow (from Random House)

A captivating novel of rich spectacle and royal scandal, Days of Splendor, Days of Sorrow spans fifteen years in the fateful reign of Marie Antoinette, France’s most legendary and notorious queen.

Paris, 1774. At the tender age of eighteen, Marie Antoinette ascends to the French throne alongside her husband, Louis XVI. But behind the extravagance of the young queen’s elaborate silk gowns and dizzyingly high coiffures, she harbors deeper fears for her future and that of the Bourbon dynasty.

From the early growing pains of marriage to the joy of conceiving a child, from her passion for Swedish military attaché Axel von Fersen to the devastating Affair of the Diamond Necklace, Marie Antoinette tries to rise above the gossip and rivalries that encircle her. But as revolution blossoms in America, a much larger threat looms beyond the gilded gates of Versailles—one that could sweep away the French monarchy forever.

Read an excerpt
Discussion Questions
Buy at: Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, Chapters Indigo, B&N, and IndieBound

About Juliet Grey (from Random House)

Juliet Grey is the author of Becoming Marie Antoinette. She has extensively researched European royalty and is a particular devotee of Marie Antoinette, as well as a classically trained professional actress with numerous portrayals of virgins, vixens, and villainesses to her credit. She and her husband divide their time between New York City and southern Vermont.

GIVEAWAY DETAILS  (US only)

I have 5 copies of Days of Splendor, Days of Sorrow by Juliet Grey to share with my US readers only.  To enter…

• For 1 entry leave me a comment entering the giveaway.
• For 2 entries, follow my blog.  If you already do, thank you, and please let me know so I can pass the extra entry on to you as well.
• For 3 entries, blog or tweet this giveaway and spread the word!

This giveaway is open to US residents only (no PO boxes) and I will draw for the winners on Saturday, June 23/12.  Good luck to all!

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Good day everyone!  Please help me to welcome Kathleen Shoop, author of After the Fog, to the blog today!   I had hoped to have my review for you today and Kathleen’s post tomorrow but due to a really sore shoulder I’ve had to move things around so for that I apologize but the review should be up tomorrow for sure!  This is a great novel full of history and family and I am really enjoying it. I haven’t had a chance to read Kathleen’s first novel The Last Letter but so many of my blogger pals have loved it so I know that I will too.  It’s certainly on my list to read especially after reading After the Fog.  Kathleen joins us today to talk about her love of history, research and fiction…

It’s such an honor to be here at Peeking Between the Pages, thank you!

In thinking about the books I write, research and family stories always come to mind. For writers the way family history fits into writing historical fiction can be tricky. First of all, unless you’re a Kennedy or a Kardashian, writing the true, exact details of your life are probably pretty boring. Frankly, even the rich and famous admit the nuts and bolts of their existence are less than gripping. Well, most of us will never know if that’s true, but for the most part, it’s safe to say, writing fiction—even with the help of family letters, documents and lore—should involve more than the “truth.”

For example, when I wrote The Last Letter I had the benefit of more than 50 family letters to inform my story. In fact, the letters that inspired my novel are so full of beautiful turns of phrase and intricate detail, that I published them as a companion piece for people who love primary historical sources. But, in writing the novel, I knew the story needed more than what was in the letters. I needed to tell the story that wasn’t in them. The detail—the way my great-great grandmother helped lathe a house, how they used oil to soothe frozen body parts, and what she read—would make it into my novel, but only as it pertained to the larger plot.

In After the Fog, I have a 1948 industrial disaster that changed the way the world viewed the environment and public health. I didn’t have family letters, but I had eyewitness accounts, even interviews with people who were in Donora, PA when the killing smog descended on the town. I had my grandmother and relatives who lived in steel towns. I had the rhythm of their language, the first-hand insight into how their lives were shaped by the mills in the same way the steel itself was.

Also, I had the gritty details which were paramount in recreating the life and times of post-war America: Using putty to pull soot off of walls; constant sweeping of porches; dusting of every surface that held filth; and the way men needed a white shirt to get to work and a second shirt once they arrived to replace the first, blackened one—the pride they felt in owning these material goods in the first place.

But, the details alone, the ones in family letters or the minds of those who lived through the “five days of fog” are not enough to sustain a fictional story. I needed to be immersed in the research so that the characters would enter the stage bearing the hallmarks of the time and setting, through the way they talked, moved, and used the objects around them.

Keeping that in mind and knowing it’s important that the characters and their lives reflect the time in which 0the story takes place, I am careful not to clutter the book with clichés or stereotypes. The characters might have the window-dressing associated with stereotypes, but hopefully I manage to create characters that step past what we all think we know about a particular time. That to me, helps make a narrative compelling.

I am fortunate to love history, the research and also to adore fiction. In combining the two, I hope I bridge the gap between necessary detail and riveting storytelling. My hope is that readers find themselves lost in the past.

About After the Fog

Rose Pavlesic is a straight-talking, gifted nurse who is also controlling and demanding. She has to be to ensure her life is mistake-free and to create a life for her children that reflects everything she missed as an orphaned child. Rose has managed to keep her painful secrets buried in her past, away from her loving husband—who she discovers has secrets of his own—their dutiful children and their large extended, complicated family.

But, as a stagnant weather cycle works to trap poisonous gasses from the three mills in town, Rose’s nursing career thrusts her into a conflict of interest she never could have fathomed—putting the lives of her loved ones at risk. As the fog thickens, Rose’s neighbors are dying; thousands of people in the community are becoming increasingly ill. Rose is faced with decisions that can destroy her carefully constructed House of Pavlesic and reveal its true character.

Buy After the Fog at: Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, Kindle (great price of $2.99)

About Kathleen Shoop

After the Fog is the second novel by bestselling Kindle author Kathleen Shoop. Her debut novel, The Last Letter, garnered multiple awards in 2011.

A Language Arts Coach with a Ph.D. in Reading Education, Kathleen lives in Oakmont, Pennsylvania with her husband and two children.

Kathleen’s website
Kathleen’s blog
Find Kathleen on Facebook
Follow Kathleen on Twitter

GIVEAWAY DETAILS (US only)

I have one copy of After the Fog by Kathleen Shoop to share with my readers.  To enter…

• For 1 entry simply leave me a comment entering the giveaway.
• For 2 entries, follow my blog.  If you already do, thank you, and please let me know in your comment so I can pass the extra entry on to you as well.
• For 3 entries, blog or tweet this giveaway and spread the word.

This giveaway is open to US residents only (no PO boxes) and I will draw for the winner on Saturday, June 9/12.  Good luck!

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I’m pleased to have Kaira Rouda, author of All the Difference, here at Peeking Between the Pages today.  Kaira is such a nice person and so easy to work with – I adore authors like that!  I haven’t had the chance to read her first novel Here, Home, Hope but I have read many good reviews from bloggers.  Her new novel All the Difference sounds fantastic and I can’t wait to get to it.  Unfortunately my reading schedule right at this minute is full to brimming but I thought it would be nice to have Kaira do a guest post and offer up a copy of her new book for giveaway.  So enjoy Kaira’s post about what it’s like to have her second novel out in the world…

Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to visit your blog today, Darlene! Of course, I’m here to talk about my new novel, ALL THE DIFFERENCE. What’s it like having my second novel out in the world? It’s awesome. Here’s why.

When your first novel is finally published, it’s a big deal. It’s the first born. It’s especially gratifying if you, like me, have been trying to get published for years and years. So, I focused a lot of attention on marketing my baby – telling the world HERE, HOME, HOPE had arrived. I visited 22 states last summer and had book signings, private parties and the like. It was a wonderful, amazing experience and the response to my debut was more than I could have ever dreamed.

And number two? Of course, ALL THE DIFFERENCE is just as special to me. This story was quite fun to write. There are much more shenanigans and a dose of suspense. I’d always wanted to try my hand at different perspectives and points of view. And being a huge fan of Law & Order, as well as Sara Paretsky, Susan Isaacs and others, I loved the chance to add a little murder to the suburban mix. So far, readers have enjoyed the story, too.

I’m most gratified that many reviewers have remarked that they are enjoying the range of stories I’m sharing. I’d like to remain non-genred (not sure that’s a word). I love chick lit, but I also enjoy a good mystery/suspense book and I have an historical fiction novel up next on my bedside table. I think many readers are like me, too. I hope so, at least. In HERE, HOME, HOPE – described as “warm, witty and enlightening” – the protagonist Kelly is wrestling with a midlife crisis of sorts and comes through it with the help of her friends. In ALL THE DIFFERENCE – described as “fun, sexy and suspenseful” -the question is: Would you go to extremes to live the life of your dreams? Both novels are very different stories, as is my next novel, IN THE MIRROR.

I’m in the process of final edits for IN THE MIRROR, my third baby. This baby also is very close to my heart. I hope, if you’ve enjoyed one or both of my other novels, you’ll want to give this next one a try. I am having so much fun living the life I’ve dreamed of since a child, writing stories and hopefully, inspiring and entertaining readers along the way. Thank you again for allowing me to visit! Happy reading.

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Thank you so much for this great guest post Kaira!  I can’t wait to get started on All the Difference!

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About All the Difference

Beautiful Ellen abandons her life as a successful fund-raiser for that of isolated housewife in the country estate she shares with her husband, whose affairs become increasingly hard to ignore.

Television anchor Laura is driven to succeed, and her choices are motivated by her one dream in life—to move out of small-time media markets, and on to the big time, whatever the cost.

Angie is the luckless waitress who spends her time waiting for Mr. Right in “shiny shoes” to save her from temporary jobs and a life spent making bad choices, particularly when it comes to men.

ALL THE DIFFERENCE is the story of three women whose lives become entangled by the choices they make and how, ultimately, one of them turns to murder to achieve her goals.

Reading Guide
Buy at: Amazon.com, B&N, Sony eReader, Kobo, and Amazon.ca

About Kaira Rouda

Non-official bio: Due to the career ladder of her professor father, Kaira was born in Chicago (Northwestern), moved to L.A. (USC), then to Austin (University of Texas), Boston (Harvard University) and finally Columbus (The Ohio State University) where Kaira, her mom and her siblings put their collective feet down and grew roots. Kaira spent the remainder her childhood in Columbus, and following graduation from Vanderbilt University, returned to spend another 20-plus years in Central Ohio in the marketing and publishing fields. She believes she has written just about everything: for public relations and advertising clients, including copy for electronics manuals (yawn), press releases for dog ice cream and hamburgers, carpet cleaning television and radio spots, to real estate websites and more; for business newspapers, regional and national magazines and blogs; for countless charities near and dear to her heart; a business book for women entrepreneurs; and now, finally, she is writing what she dreamed of writing since fourth grade: novels of her own. Here, Home, Hope is the first of several novels, all set in the fictional suburb of Grandville, that will be published. Kaira is ecstatic her dreams are coming true.

Kaira is a philanthropist who started Central Ohio’s first homeless shelter for families in the early 1990s, served two terms on the board of the MidOhio Food Bank, the YWCA, The Wexner Center for the Arts and numerous other charities, with a particular interest in empowering women and girls. The creator of the Real Living Real Estate brand — one of the fastest growing in the country — Kaira has earned numerous awards in business. For more on her career, please visit RealYouIncorporated.com.

Two years ago — of course not following her oldest child who had picked a college there — Kaira and her husband and four kids moved to Southern California where she is busy writing, volunteering, and growing new roots.

Kaira’s website
Kaira’s blog
Kaira on Facebook
Follow Kaira on Twitter

GIVEAWAY DETAILS

I have one paperback copy of All the Difference by Kaira Rouda to share with my readers.  To enter…

• For 1 entry simply leave me a comment entering the giveaway.
• For 2 entries, follow my blog.  If you already do, thanks, and let me know so I can pass that extra entry on to you as well.
• For 3 entries, blog or tweet this giveaway and spread the word!

This giveaway is open to US and Canadian residents only (no PO boxes) and I will draw for the winner on Saturday, May 26/12.  Good luck everyone!

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Today I’m featuring Judi Fennell, a long time favorite author of mine who writes quirky and fun romances mixed with magic.  Judi’s books are pure escapism for me and I always love to settle in with one.   Her newest novel is called Beauty and The Best and she’s self-published this one so I’d love to help her get the word out as much as possible.  Stay tuned for my review in the next month or so.  I’ve read everything she’s written so far:  The Tritone Trilogy which includes In Over Her Head, Wild Blue Under, and Catch of a Lifetime and The Bottled Magic series which includes I Dream of Genies and Genie Knows Best with one more on the way.  I can’t wait to read Beauty and The Best but in the meantime I’m going to share a guest post and a giveaway with my readers.  Please welcome Judi as she talks about self-publishing in her guest post entitled Taking the Plunge! …

I took the plunge. I dove into the deep end. I jumped in feet first!

This sounds like it should be an intro to another one of my Mermen books, doesn’t it? But it’s not.

So what did I jump into? And why?

I joined the many authors who are not only publishing with traditional print publishers, but are now self-publishing and I have to say, it’s been quite a fun experience!

Why, you ask? Why would someone who worked so hard to achieve the dream of publication place a piece of work “out there” themselves with no safety net (i.e., advance/royalty payment) and do ALL of the work from writing, working with a professional editor and copy editor, finding a cover artist and spend hours pouring over cover model photos (yeah, that was a tough part of the job, let me tell you…), to writing back cover copy, formatting for all the different e- and print platforms, figuring out pricing, setting up blog tours and promo opportunities, and spreading the word?

Because my readers want my stories.

Publishing has changed a lot in the past year and a half. A LOT. And readers are benefitting. There are stories that, for whatever reason, traditional publishers chose not to take a chance on. No book is guaranteed to “hit” with the market. Can you imagine how those 27 publishers who rejected J.K. Rowling must feel, knowing they had the chance to have brought that series to market and turned it down, deeming it not marketable? Publishing in many ways, is a crapshoot. Some hit, some don’t. But that doesn’t mean the ones that don’t get chosen for that possible hit aren’t worth reading.

This is what happened with my first self-published book, Beauty and The Best. This story was in the American Title Contest, and was the only romance to make the Top 20 Finalists in the Gather.com/Simon & Schuster First Chapters contest out of almost 2,700 general fiction entries. (Press release in NYT about the contest here, and list of Top 20 finalists here.) The story has been around and the opening line (There’s a naked man in my kitchen.) was one people have remembered and continuously asked me about.

So I decided to let Todd and Jolie have their moment in the sun. (Actually, they have quite the moment in the sun-dappled corner of his art studio, but you’ll have to read the book to hear about that!) I had an absolute blast working with Kimberly Van Meter on the cover. She really captured the fun, flirty tone of the book, and the picture of Boots, the cat, with his halo and gleam in his eye was perfect. And Todd isn’t too shabby either. 

What was also a lot of fun was hearing from my readers who have been not-so-patiently waiting for this story. It’s the first release in my Once-Upon-A-Time Romance series, a series that actually spawned my debut novel, In Over Her Head.

How? Well, In Over Her Head is a twist on The Little Mermaid that came about because I’d written Beauty and The Best and If The Shoe Fits (a Cinderella story), and had started Fairest of Them All (yep, Snow White). I decided to twist The Little Mermaid by making him the Mer and her the Human. While writing that story, Reel’s brother Rod popped into my head and voila! The Mer series was born. But Once-Upon-A-Time was always there, hovering in my brain and when I had the chance to put it up myself, I went for it.

And talk about the tie-in with the Once Upon A Time and Grimm television shows, two shows that I am sure to DVR each week. The response has been great for this series and I hope to have If The Shoe Fits out in the near future. (You can sign up for my newsletter if you would like to be notified when it does: email me at JudiFennell@JudiFennell.com.)
I hope you enjoy Todd and Jolie’s story. I truly loved watching these two grow together.

And the opening “naked man in the kitchen” scene, isn’t a bad visual either…

Enjoy:

There’s a naked man in my kitchen.

The thought registered just as the terse, “Who the hell are you?” had Jolie Gardener spinning around faster than a figure skater on speed.

He had the nerve to ask this? He of the broad shoulders, six-pack abs, and other, nice, um, parts…

Really. A naked man. In her kitchen.

Well, technically, she was in a naked man’s kitchen. Even more technically, she was in a naked Todd Best’s kitchen—and there wasn’t one hint of self-consciousness or embarrassment on his part. Of course with that body, there shouldn’t be. The guy should flaunt his nudity for the world to see. Which, at present, consisted of one single, solitary person: Jolie Gardener, aspiring writer and personal chef extraordinaire.

“Well?” His hands slammed to his hips.

“You’re naked,” she squeaked, which, really, was the only way to state that kind of obvious.

“I’m what?” Mr. Six-Pack Abs glanced down.

Jolie tried not to—so unsuccessfully it was pitiful.

“Shit,” he muttered. “I am. I, uh, fell asleep last night…”

As butter sizzled in the new super-slick omelet pan on the top-of-the-line range, Jolie’s gaze alternated between some rock-hard abs and a scruffy eight a.m. shadow while her fingers danced along the speckled granite countertop in search of a napkin, placemat, oven mitt… something.

Mercifully, they scooped up a thick dishtowel that, in her world, would constitute a very plush, very luxurious hand towel from The Ritz or The Four Seasons, but which, here, apparently, was used to soak up water from designer flatware. She dangled it in the direction of Mr. Au Naturel. “Here.”

He placed an empty bottle of Jim Beam on the island countertop with a clink, then took the towel with a grunt. “So, who are you, what are you doing in my kitchen, and would you mind turning around?”

She turned. “I’m the new girl the agency sent over.”

“Hell. There better be some aspirin left,” he muttered beside her, his bare (of course) feet making no sound on the limestone floor.

She peeked over at him.

His eyebrow soared skyward.

Right.

###
© 2012 Judi Fennell

I’ve been getting a lot of feedback on weird job situations that have happened to people – so far no one has had a naked boss show up, (not that I’d consider that a horror story if said boss was Todd Best, but sadly, most of them aren’t). Some of the stories people have shared just make you shake your head. It’s so true that Truth is stranger than Fiction.

What’s one of your job horror stories?

About Beauty and The Best (from the back cover)

Can she cook up a recipe for love?

Jolie Gardener, personal chef by day, aspiring romance writer by night,
likes to talk and does it a lot. She has to because if she stops, all the pain, disillusionment, and abandonment of her AWOL mother, question-mark father, and foster-care childhood will rise up like a chocolate soufflé on steroids, sweeping away the fragile infrastructure of her life.
But she’s fine. Really. She is.
Or so she thinks.

Todd Best isn’t fine. He knows it. And doesn’t care.
After his wife died—the woman who believed in him when he was a struggling artist—he put painting aside, moved from their home, and lost himself in the minutiae of daily life.
Alone. Private. The way he likes it.
The last thing he needs is some chatty cook seeping into the perfectly bland canvas of his life.
Or so he thinks.

So when Jonathan, a guardian-angel-in-training, turns himself into a kitten to help these two lonely souls find a happily ever after together, it ought to be a piece of cake.
Or so he thinks…

Currently available as an eBook (will be out in print as well soon): Amazon.com and B&N

About Judi Fennell

PRISM Award and Golden Leaf Award-winning author, Judi Fennell, has had her nose in a book and her head in some celestial realm all her life, including those early years when her mom would exhort her to “get outside!” instead of watching Bewitched or I Dream of Jeannie on television. So she did—right into Dad’s hammock with her Nancy Drew books.

These days she’s more likely to have her nose in her laptop and her head (and the rest of her body) at her favorite writing spot, but she’s still reading, whether it be her latest manuscript or friends’ books.
Author of “fairy tales with a twist,” pun-filled, tongue-in-cheek, contemporary paranormal romances, starting with the Tritone Trilogy about Mermen and the Humans who love them, her Bottled Magic Series about genies and magic and falling in love, and now her Once-Upon-A-Time Romances, those twisted fairy tales that were the inspiration for her tagline.

Dive into the romance on her website, www.JudiFennell.com, for excerpts, deleted scenes, reviews, contests, and pictures from reader and writer conferences.

Judi’s website
Judi’s blog
Find Judi on Facebook

GIVEAWAY DETAILS

I have one copy of Beauty and The Best by Judi Fennell to share with my readers in either print form or eBook – whichever you prefer.  To enter…

• For 1 entry simply leave me a comment entering the giveaway.
• For 2 entries, follow my blog.  If you already do, thank you, and please let me know so I can pass the extra entry on to you as well.
• For 3 entries, blog or tweet this giveaway and spread the word.

This giveaway is open to US and Canadian residents only (no PO boxes) and I will draw for the winner on Saturday, May 12/12.  Good luck!

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