Book & Author Details:
Choosing Happiness by Melissa Stevens
Publication date: July 21st 2015
Genres: Adult, Romance
Publication date: July 21st 2015
Genres: Adult, Romance
Synopsis:
Andrea is drawn to the man who calls Ben brother. Something about him speaks to her, but she’s not sure what. She falls into things head first, but when something makes her question how fast things are going she slams on the breaks. Can the two of them figure out what’s going on with them before it’s too late?
Purchase:
B&N: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/choosing-happiness-melissa-stevens/1121790689?ean=9781511770606
Later in the evening, after people
started to leave, Jake asked Andrea to dance. It was a slow song and he had his
arms around her. He leaned in until his lips brushed against her ear. "I'd
like to take you home with me."
Andrea smiled. "I’d like to
take you up on that but I need to stay, at least until Ben and Jeanie leave. I
have to help Mom load the gifts. She's going to take them home and keep them
for Ben and Jeanie until they get back."
"That's fine. I can hang
around and help."
"That's really sweet of
you, but you don't have to. I'm sure you have to be up early tomorrow."
"Actually, I'm off. There's
nothing stopping me from staying out all night if I want."
"Well," her face
heated. "I also don't want my family thinking I would pick someone up at
my brother's wedding and go home with him." She looked down so he wouldn’t
see her blush.
"No problem." He
smiled against her ear. "I'll hang around and help. When we’re done we can
leave separately and meet somewhere else. We can go to my place or we can go out
for coffee. I don't know about you, but after all this," he motioned
around them, where the flashing lights and loud music vibrated through their
bodies. "I'm going to need to decompress for a bit before I'm anywhere
near ready to sleep."
She looked up at him a moment,
seeing his point. "What part of town do you live in?"
"The northwest side,
why?"
"So I don't tell you to
meet me someplace in the opposite direction." She fell silent for a few
seconds as she thought about places that would be open when they finally got
out of there. "In the Ranch district, that's what that side of town's
called, I don’t know why. There's a Denny's on the corner of Maple and
Waterson. You know where that is?"
He thought for just a second.
"It's in the shopping center with Grant's Market isn't it?"
"Yeah, I think so. Let's
meet there. We can have some coffee, eat something if we feel like it and
unwind a little. Then, we can decide where to go from there."
"That works. I’ll look
forward to it." He placed a gentle kiss on her ear.
The music ended and they made
their way off the dance floor, each going separate ways. Jake went to Ben,
Andrea saw them standing together talking while she made her way to her mother.
“How are things going?” She sat
down beside Sophia.
“So far so good.” Sophia looked
around the room, watching for anything that might need her attention.
“Where’s Dad.”
“He’s around here somewhere. I
saw him over there talking to Eddie Cruz a little while ago.” She motioned to
one side of the large room. “Is the car ready for Ben and Jeanie to leave?”
“I’m not sure. I’ll check on
it.” Andrea went out to see if the car was ready. She smiled at the balloons
attached to the top and trunk. She thought the groomsmen had decorated it well
and let her mother know it was ready.
Less than an hour later they had
loaded the newlyweds into the decorated rental car and sent them on their way
with shouts of good luck and have fun. People started drifting away faster
after the couple of honor were gone. Within an hour there were less than ten
people left. Andrea started cleaning up, picking up the abandoned plates and
cups scattered around the room and depositing them in a large trash can she dragged
with her, until her mother made her stop.
"We'll get this done in the
morning, dear," Sophia said "Let's just get the gifts loaded and call
it a night."
Andrea looked around and seeing
that all the plates of food were gone, she nodded. "Alright, Mom. Do you
want to back the car up near the door? I think that will be easier than hauling
them all the way out."
"Will you do that for me? I
don't trust myself to back it in, not in the dark." Sophia held out the
keys to her car.
"No problem." She
accepted them and headed outside.
Between Andrea, her parents,
Jake, and a couple other friends who had hung around to help, they made quick
work of stacking the gifts into the back of Sophia's car.
Closing the trunk, Andrea turned
to Sophia. "Do you want me to follow you home and help unload these?"
"No, I'm going to pull the
car into the garage and not worry about unloading them until tomorrow. I think
your father and I can manage it."
"All right." Andrea
started to walk away but turned back. "What time do you want to meet here
to finish the clean-up in the morning?"
"Not too early. I plan to
sleep late tomorrow."
"So about nine?"
"That sounds good."
Sophia agreed.
"I'll be here, too,"
Jake interrupted.
"You don't have to do that,
dear." Sophia told him.
"But I do. I can't leave
you two to do all the work. Those tables are heavy and you're not moving them
by yourselves. Besides, Ben told me I could adopt his family and I won’t let
you do all this work alone. You're just going to be stuck with me." He
grinned, letting them know he was as serious as he was teasing.
AUTHOR BIO:
Melissa was born and raised in Arizona, she's spent her entire life living across the southern half of the state. She's found that, along with her husband and three children, she prefers the small towns and rural life to feeling packed into a city.
She started reading at a very young age, and her love for series started early, as the first real books she remembers reading is the Boxcar Children series by Gertrude Chandler Warner. Through the years she's found that there's little she won't read, and her tastes vary from westerns, to romance, to sci-fi / fantasy and Horror.
She's been writing since 2009, and enjoys nearly every minute of it.
Social Media Links:
She started reading at a very young age, and her love for series started early, as the first real books she remembers reading is the Boxcar Children series by Gertrude Chandler Warner. Through the years she's found that there's little she won't read, and her tastes vary from westerns, to romance, to sci-fi / fantasy and Horror.
She's been writing since 2009, and enjoys nearly every minute of it.
Social Media Links:
Guest Blog
I’m often asked if I base my characters on people I know.
No. Each character’s personality is different. I do sometimes steal mannerisms,
haircuts, personal preferences, but more often than not it’s what the character
has told me about themselves and yes, they actually speak to me.
Sometimes I’ll be sitting in a restaurant with my family and
over hear something at the next table that makes my mind spin. It may give me
an idea or it may just sound so much like one of the people living in my head
that they end up saying something similar in the future.
I may see someone somewhere who inspires my physically, and
actually for Jade’s Peace, Steve was inspired by my mental image of what Model
Jeremy Aaron’s personality might be like. I kept a picture of him on my desktop
and when I had doubts about how Steve might behave, how he would react to
something I could look at the pic and I just knew. Often, though I don’t need a
visual aid. With Jade, she spoke to me, and told me things I didn’t have
planned at all. She started out as an only child. And I was writing along and
she says to me, “Watch out, my brother will be here tomorrow.” My immediate
thought was, “You don’t have a brother.” She was adamant though and replied,
“Yes I do and he’ll be here tomorrow.” Sure enough, he showed up, and I had to
go back and fix a few things but I’ll admit, he made the story better.
I find that my best stories, at least to me, at the ones
where I start out with a vague idea of the story, I have two characters and a
rough ending, (Hey, this is romance, they always end up together, right?) and
let the characters tell me their story as I go along. The characters always
seem more alive when they lead their own stories.
I started writing almost six years ago after receiving an
email about National Novel Writing Month, more commonly knowns as NaNoWriMo. I
read the email that told about the international challenge to write 50,000
words in 30 days and thought, “That’s insane,” and I threw the email away. But
the seed had been planted. The idea wouldn’t leave me alone. And it haunted me
night and day. I checked my trash bin, because I needed more information, but
the email was gone. I finally had to google it. It didn’t take long before I
was on the right website, taking in all the information they had to offer.
On November 1st I started writing, and I wrote
and wrote and wrote, and low and behold I managed to finish the book, and get
the 50k in 30 days. I was hooked. Over the next year I didn’t do much, we
bought a house and moved and I had a preschool child still at home, that was
all I could handle. Then in September I found a deal online for some
bookshelves for the new house. I was talking to the woman who was selling them
and she told me how she was trying to write and sell a book, I told her I’d
written one but I hadn’t really tried to sell it. Let me tell you, that was
embarrassing. Not that I’d written it but that I hadn’t done anything with it
since. So I went home and started rewriting, then submitted it to a couple of
small publishers. While I waited for responses, I plotted and did NaNoWriMo that
year. I had a good portion of that book done, 65k, at the end of the month and
I set it aside for the holidays.
During that break I started getting responses back on the
first one, rejections… but there were a couple of really good rejections in
there. How can a rejection be good you might wonder? Well, if the editor offers
any kind of reasoning or advice, that’s a good rejection. You can learn from
it. There were a couple of those in there... “I really like the <story,
style, whatever> BUT… and while it’s not an acceptance, those buts can be
really helpful if you choose to take the criticism constructively.
By the time I got these responses, I’d been over that first
book about 8 times in just a couple months and I was done with it. I didn’t
want to look at it again to fix it so I just set it aside and went to work
finishing then rewriting the book I’d mostly written that November.
The next year (2011) I signed up to be my region’s Municipal
Liaison for NaNaWriMo. What that means is I was the local front person trying
to spread the word, gain participants and do events for the month. I loved it,
but it was a lot of work. After 2011 I started writing all the time, not just
in November. In the process of getting ready and finding people for NaNo 2011 I
found a writing group that meets at my local library. They have been a godsend
to me.
Because of my writing group I investigated and started
self-publishing, my first book releasing in January of 2012. We had some major
life issues that summer and I decided I just didn’t have the time to ML again,
so I dropped it… but this year I’m back, with a friend from my writing group,
and we’re doing it together. We’ve already scheduled “NaNoWriMo Prep classes”
with 2 branches of our local library. It’s a lot of work, but it’s worth it
Oh, and how have I done in the last few years? My 8th
book just came out and I have several more in different stages.
People often ask me where I get my ideas. The short answer
is everywhere. But let me give you an example. A few weeks ago I was
vacationing with my family, we it was a limited electricity vacation. And I was
doing as I tend to do, reading in bed for a little while before sleeping. I
didn’t like the direction whatever book was going. I thought what if. What if
instead of, this guy turning out to be the average bad guy he was secretly
good? What if there was a book or series of books where…
No, I’m not going to give the idea away, because in the
short amount of time I’ve been home I’ve actually been working on developing
the idea. I’m hoping to turn it into a series. But this is how a lot of things
work, at least for me. Driving through traffic to pick up the kids, something
pops into my head. I wear a headset on my phone for times just like this, I hit
the voice recorder or texting app while sitting at a stop light and tell the
phone my notes. It’s not perfect but when I go back to it later I can figure
out what I meant.
It’s not unheard of for me to sit at baseball practice with
a notebook, working on whatever story I’m caught up in. Often a change of
scenery helps if things aren’t flowing to suit me. If I can’t figure out what’s
next, I’ll pack up and go to Starbucks, or do whatever I have to with the kids,
taking notes in the notebook that goes everywhere with me, and putting them
into the computer later.
Personally I think everyone has these flashes where things
pop into their heads, I’ve just learned to really listen to mine.
• Paperback copy of Choosing Happiness
a Rafflecopter giveaway
No comments:
Post a Comment