I’d taken a little break from the blog interviews after the holiday blog tour, but today I’m starting back into it. I’ve got four authors lined up for you guys to meet of the next few weeks before I take another break from interviews as my due date gets closer.
So today let me introduce you to Lacie Doyle. I met Lacie when she joined us for the holiday blog tour, and absolutely fell in love with her blurb and excerpt. I’ve preordered The Deal, The Proposition, and The Contract all of which will be joining my iBook shelf this month!
So let’s get to know Lacie!
1. Tell us a little bit about yourself.
I write romantic comedies and contemporary romance, and have started to dabble in erotic romance as well. When I write, I like to have plenty of snacks on hand. Oh, who am I kidding? I like eating, period. I also like to listen to music as I write, mostly R&B. I call them poems in musical form. It helps me feel the love. Or heartbreak. Or pain. Whatever scene I’m trying to create.
2. What are your writing career goals?
To become a household name, make millions of dollars, and get a few movie deals. Hey, go big or go home, right?
No, just kidding. My goals are a bit tamer than that. I would like to hit the New York Times bestseller list one day. But mostly, finish my queue of never-ending works in progress.
3. What has been the hardest scene for you to write?
Sex scenes.
What?
Yes, sex scenes. The problem with sex scenes is it requires emphasis on the emotional side of it. And, well, I’m not an emotional person. I’m a very mellow person. So it requires a lot of deep thinking on my part.
So you may ask why I write Romance?
Because I’m all about the happy endings. I love happy endings! The happy endings mean everything to me. I need my happily ever afters. Not even a Happily For Now. For me, it’s Happily Ever After, all the way. (I’m a romantic at heart. Shh!) This even extends to the secondary characters. Everybody needs to ride off into the sunset, everybody happy happy, joy joy. Anything less and it bothers me.
4. As a writer, what do you think you struggle with the most? (Could be an element of craft/motivation/promo and the business side)
Hands down, the prose. I’m a fast typist (about 85 wpm), but unfortunately it does me no good when it doesn’t translate to forming the words, to writing and telling the story. I’m a slow writer, as in at a glacial pace of about 500 words per hour. I once spent 8 hours on 300 words. Yes, sadly, you read that right.
5. How do you come up with your titles?
Oh, boy. In multiple ways. Sometimes a phrase pops into my head and I build a story around the title, other times I build the title around the story. And other times, I build it around the cover image.
I did all three methods for the books in the Risky Business trilogy. I built The Deal, the first book of the trilogy, from the cover image; The Proposition, the second book, from the story; and the final book, The Contract, from a phrase. All I knew was they needed to fit together as a series. That was my only guiding force.
6. Do you have plans for Valentine’s Day?
Not really. I try to treat each day like Valentine’s Day. Not so much in the gifts and chocolate (I’m not really a chocolate person—I know, gasp!), but in that I try to keep the romance alive each day. A little touch here, a little glance there. Let him know in little ways how much he means to me. 🙂
7. Tell us a little bit about your newest release.
The Proposition is the second book in the Risky Business trilogy, which covers the stories of three best friends and each of their office romances.
In this book, Reed Garrett and his secretary Cara Delaney are forced to marry—and quickly. Time is of the essence. And despite the quickie nuptials, their marriage starts off well. But then of course things happen outside of their control that put their marriage in jeopardy. Will they be able to withstand the troubles or will they succumb to it? Tune in next week to find out! (Not really—the book comes out February 26!)
The Proposition was actually written years ago, back when I first started writing. But I never did anything with it, until I decided to extend The Deal into a series of stories about office romances. And The Proposition fit the bill. Even the title was appropriate. So I tweaked it to go along with the others, then combined them into the trilogy. Et voilà!
THE PROPOSITION
BLURB:
Since he was young, Reed Garrett had been groomed to eventually take over his father’s corporate empire. Except now that the day is approaching, his father is suddenly telling him he’ll hand the company over only after Reed presents him with a grandchild!
Cara Delaney, his normally assiduous secretary, seems preoccupied as of late. When Reed learns of the reason, he may have found a solution to both their problems. Her brother has been threatened with bodily harm, and possibly even death, if he doesn’t pay back a debt within a week, to the hefty tune of half a million dollars. And she doesn’t have that kind of money to save him.
But Reed does. And he proposes he pay off the debt, on the condition that she marry him and bear his child.
EXCERPT:
“Cara?” Evan’s frantic sobbing carried through the phone, each breath a convulsive gasp, interspersed with wheezing as he fought for air.
Fear immediately gripped her. The last time she’d heard her brother cry like this was the day their parents died and he’d run into her arms as soon as he saw her approaching their parents’ crumpled car, crying his poor little heart out, both from the trauma of enduring the accident and from losing his parents. At the time she had put on a brave face for his sake and pretended everything would be fine, though she was hardly old enough to be taking care of herself, let alone a young child.
Hearing the panic in his voice today, she nearly failed to put on that brave face again.
She gripped the phone tighter. “What’s happened, Evan?”
“I’m in trouble, Cara! I don’t know what to do!”
“Tell me what’s happened!”
“They said they’re going to come for me if I don’t have the money by next week!”
“They? Who’s ‘they’? What money?” All his disjointed words only heightened her alarm.
“Cara, I owe some people money and they want it now.”
Some of her panic subsided. It didn’t sound too bad. How much money could he have borrowed? A few hundred dollars? Probably to some punk teenagers, maybe some fellow students at his school. Luckily she had set aside some money for emergencies. It was only a couple thousand, but it should be enough to pay off a debt made by an eighteen-year-old college student. It couldn’t be much for someone who spent his time either in class or playing video games.
But first she needed to calm her brother down.
“Just take a deep breath, Evan. Everything’s going to be okay. Nothing can’t be fixed. We’ve been through worse, haven’t we?”
Her words seemed to do its trick, as she continued to use a soft, soothing tone until his sobbing slowly subsided into a couple hiccups here and there.
Once he calmed down, she took a deep breath in order to tackle the problem rationally. First she needed to understand the full extent of the situation.
“How much do you owe?”
“Five-hundred-thousand dollars.”
Buy Links:
Amazon:
All other vendors:
https://www.books2read.com/u/ml5yYv
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