Book Spotlight with Melody DeBlois: THAT APRIL IN SANTA MONICA

Fellow Wild Rose Press author Melody DeBlois stops by today with a look at THAT APRIL IN SANTA MONICA, including an additional excerpt about Madison's slightly unhealthy relationship with clothes. Welcome Melody!

Blurb:

Madison receives acclaim for running a talent agency for people with disabilities, but she doesn't know how to take care of herself. When her altruism becomes life-threatening-a matter of either develop healthy habits or die-she joins a reality TV show that pairs her with hot, raven-haired Brandon. He is witty, sexy, and her teacher. That makes him off limits.

After a successful run on a soap opera, Brandon stepped away from empty fame and now focuses on his work as TV's most noted health teacher. He has one fast rule-never fall for a student. But when he meets Madison, their chemistry is combustible. There's no hiding their conflict or their attraction, especially when it's all caught on film.

Clothes Make the Character:

When Brandon and Madison are cleaning out her closet, frustrated, she asks, “Is there not some clothes-horse support group I could join? That pretty well sums up her addiction. Here is a short scene in which Brandon rewards her for clearing out the stuff she doesn’t need by taking her to Bloomingdales to pick out new yoga outfits.

The hangers click-clacked, rubbing together on a rail, as Madison Gray chose a cashmere pencil skirt, an off-the-shoulder romper, and a keyhole printed dress. She spied Brandon flagging her down. Being in the store she could never afford on her own, she’d forgotten his existence. 

 “Hey,” he said, puffing up next to her and shepherding in the cameras. “Don’t you remember your motto, ‘Only splurge if you can’t live without it?’ ” 

That catchphrase, coming from the king of catchphrases, had slipped her mind. Shopping without interference—a tribe of salesgirls on hand to supply her with all the latest fashion trends—meant a turf this side of paradise. 

 Brandon tapped the clerk who had been trailing behind on her shoulder. “What can you show Ms. Gray in the way of yoga wear?” 

The girl took off. “We just got a new shipment. Wait till you see.” 

Who cared about yoga? Madison whooped at gowns too gorgeous for words, chiffon, georgette, silk charmeuse—Givenchy galore. She was browsing through them, fingering the ruffles and tucks, when someone tapped her on the shoulder. 

Brandon wrinkled his handsome brow. “Did you forget why we’re here?”

Well, of course, she hadn’t. “No, how could I with the guru and his camera yahoos?” 

She’d be darn if he would make her feel guilty. After all, didn’t she deserve a reward for fulfilling all his demands for reform? The salesgirl awaited them with hands clasped at her waist. “Right around the bend,” she prompted with a slight turn in the opposite direction. 

Madison tried not to sound like a woman who had been locked away and denied shopping. “I’m right behind you.”

And another Excerpt:

“Don’t you feel the sun’s energy balancing and healing you?”

What Madison felt was Brandon’s body heat radiating through her, tightening her muscles, skimming up her spine. That kind of warmth should come with a warning— exposure might cause side effects. Maybe she could have blamed it on chemistry or like attracting like— called it a lethal injection. She was dying for want of him.

She managed to say, “I see a halo around the sun.”

“Feel it vibrate?” he asked, turning to look at her.

Somehow, she didn’t think watching the sky had anything to do with it. The heat had gathered at the sweet place between her legs— another side effect of her being close to him. If this didn’t end up in a kiss, she didn’t think she’d be able to bear it.

Drawing in a long shaky breath, she said, “I do feel the vibration.” Oh, did she!

“Being out in the middle of nature, with the birds and the sea creatures, it does something to a person, don’t you think?”

“Amen to Mother Earth,” she said dreamily.

“There’s harmony in the sounds.” His breath seemed to have caught in his throat.

“Yes, a more beautiful melody could not exist.”

“Do you feel your eyes blur? It’s the sun cleansing you.”

Cleansing? Try heating up as if some crazy so-and-so had switched on the gas.

She moaned, “My eyes have become pools of marvel.” No, that wasn’t right. They were pools of longing, no mistaking.

Buy Links: 

Kobo  ~   Amazon  ~  Barnes and Noble

Author Bio:

Born in California, award winning author, Melody DeBlois follows the sun. When she isn’t swimming laps, she’s writing sweet and sassy romances. Her heroines are self-reliant and smart and her heroes are kind by nature and love dogs. She lives in California during the summer and spends winters in Arizona with her husband. She has plotted her novels while hiking the beach or trekking across the desert. Her most treasured possession is family.

Social Media Links:

https://www.facebook.com/melodydebloisbooks/?modal=admin_todo_tour

https://twitter.com/DeBloisMelody

https://www.pinterest.com/deblois0181/


Melody DeBlois (@melody.deblois) • Instagram photos and videos

Mary Patterson Thornburg: Clothes Make the Character

Fellow Uncial Press author Mary Patterson Thornburg is my guest today on Clothes Make the Character Monday. She's going to talk about what clothes mean to her characters. Welcome Mary!

"Clothes make the man" is one of those old sayings you have to respect even though you'd like to argue with it. According to my Google search, it's been traced to everybody from Shakespeare to Mark Twain, and it supposedly means something like "You can tell who a person is from the way that person is dressed."

I want to say, "No, no, no! Clothes are all on the surface! Clothes are not even the surface, they're just something draped over the surface! You don't know what's beneath the clothes, beneath the skin, inside the skull, under the breastbone! It could all be a costume, a disguise!" And of course, I'd be right; it could all be a disguise. But then I remember, the surface is all you can see at first. Sometimes it's all you ever see. So, when it comes to real people, I guess the saying is right even though it's probably wrong at the same time.

But what about characters in fiction? Do clothes make the character? I think that in some cases they definitely do. Because fictional characters aren't real people until the author who wrote them and the reader who reads them work the magic together that makes them real. And part of what the author does, at least in some instances, is to choose the character's clothes.

Until I'd given this some thought, I'd have said I don't pay much attention to my characters' clothes. Oh, yes, in my story "Ghosts," it's the young girl's Hallowe'en costume that shocks and disturbs her mother and has a different effect on her friends than the one she'd expected. But then, when I thought about it, I realized that clothes do play an important part in "making" some of my characters.

There's a character in one novel, which I haven't really published yet, who's dressed like this when the main character sees him for the first time:

The person was a boy, younger by the looks of him than his voice had sounded, wearing a pair of tight, sky-blue trousers and a short tunic that was embroidered closely with gleaming silver thread. Around his neck was an ornate metal collar set with multicolored jewels.

The boy's clothes, all the spangles and jewelry, absolutely scream wealth, vanity, and a certain immature lack of taste, even though the people in his world wouldn't find his costume as weird as the people in our world would. This boy turns out to be a nicer person than he first seems to be, but he never quite loses his sense of dramatizing himself by his selection of clothes. It's part of who he is, down deep inside, under the things he wears.

In my book A Glimmer of Guile, clothing plays an important role when the heroine, Vivia, deliberately uses it to make herself look in complete contrast to a woman she's about to go up against in a psychic fight to the finish. Vivia's in her early twenties, small and dark, and not particularly beautiful. The other woman is much older, tall, majestic, and very beautiful (although her beauty is something of a magic trick). Vivia wants to make her jealous, so she presents herself accordingly:

I bathed and dressed quickly in my favorite of the new outfits, another tunic suit, pale lemon-colored linen with a snug, short top and wide-legged trousers. No jewelry. I braided my hair tightly and pulled the braids back into a fountain that hung nearly to my waist. I wanted to look as young and as innocent as possible, as much in contrast to Orath as I could. I wanted her to be jealous; I wanted her to be angry. I was dressed to do battle.

And finally, in The Kura, I had to let readers know something about the main character, Alyssha, early on. Alyssha lives in our world, in Indiana, and in our time. But she's been in another world and she misses it terribly – her missing that world is what defines her life. She's eighteen, a high school senior, at an age when most young people would hardly be caught dead wearing clothes that will set them totally apart from every group, every other individual, in their community. Moreover, she's already different from them all in a way she didn't choose and can't control; she's of mixed race, raised by a poor, white, overprotective father, and she doesn't really fit in anywhere. So it says something very important about her that she chooses to make herself even more different by her choice of clothing:

She went into her bedroom and took from the old-fashioned wardrobe a matching tunic and trousers in light, puckered cotton, with a wide neckline, loose sleeves, and legs tight at the ankles. The outfit was copper-colored, just a bit lighter and brighter than her skin, and she knew she looked good in it. Mattie Hale, who owned a boutique, had made several similar outfits for her, modeled on the one she'd worn when she returned from the place old Mike had called Underland. Nobody else in Granville dressed this way, and she knew what her schoolmates' looks meant, but she didn't care. For six years she'd been homesick. This was how people dressed in Bandor, and it felt good to her.

So, readers, what do you learn about the people in a story from the way they dress? And, writers, how do you use your characters' clothes to make them into real, individual people?

BLURB for THE KURA:

For six years, Alyssha's been torn between her loyalty and love for her widowed father, the promise she made to him that she'd stay in his world, and her longing for the other world she visited for a summer when she was twelve. She found a home there, and the brother she thought she'd lost forever, and a boy who loved her, who would in these six years have become a young man, as she's become a woman. And now, when a hit-and-run victim found dying on a Granville street says her name and gives a policeman a strange object from that other place that can only mean trouble and danger, Alyssha has no choice but to go back.

When she gets there, she finds that a lot has changed…


MARY PATTERSON THORNBURG BIO:

Mary Patterson Thornburg was born in California, grew up in Washington State, moved to Montana when she was 18, and spent many years in Indiana, where she studied and then taught at Ball State University.

Her dream was always to write fantasy stories and novels, but she didn't get started until she and her husband moved back to Montana in 1998. When she'd finished her first story and it was published, she took off running and never looked back. She's had stories in Cicada, Zahir, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Strange, Weird, and Wonderful, among other places. Two of her short stories earned honorable mention in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror (2006, 2008), and "Niam's Tale," in the July/August 2010 Cicada, won the SCBWI 2011 Magazine Merit Honor Certificate. Her first fantasy/romance/adventure novel, A Glimmer of Guile, was published by Uncial Press in 2014. Her second book for Uncial, The Kura, came out in April, 2015. An Uncial Novel Byte, "Ghosts," was released October 14, 2016.


MEDIA LINKS:

Website: www.marypattersonthornburg.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Mary-Patterson-Thornburg-Author-751054628247208/

Twitter: @MaryPThornburg

BUY LINKS FOR THE KURA:

https://www.amazon.com/Kura-Mary-Patterson-Thornburg-ebook/dp/B00T5BXU8O

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-kura-mary-patterson-thornburg/1121761779?ean=2940151409612

http://www.uncialpress.com/the-kura.html

Anna Durand and Clothes make the Character

Anna Durand is my guest today and she's talking about the significance of her characters' clothes in DANGEROUS IN A KILT which releases December 16, 2016. Take it away, Anna!

A Kilt, A Secondhand Dress, and Two Wounded Hearts

Clothes really can make or break a character, especially in pivotal scenes within a book. I don't fret over what my people wear on every page, but when I first introduce a character I do spend time thinking about their outfits. After all, we writers need many tools at our disposal to craft wonderful stories. I'm not a clothes hound by any means, so please don't ask me about designers! I'll probably name the companies that make my puppies' winter jackets. :-)

I've yet to write a character who's obsessive about clothes, but who knows, I just may do that one day. When it comes to dressing my characters, my feelings about the topic are irrelevant; what matters is how they feel about it. In Dangerous in a Kilt, Erica's and Lachlan's attire helps define their personalities and their circumstances. The opening scene both introduces them to us and to each other, as they encounter each other in an underground club. Here's what they wear and why it matters:

• Erica. She wears a cherry-red dress she bought at Goodwill and altered with safety pins to make it more low-cut and high-hemmed. Her shoes are stilettos, which she has never worn before. On this night, when she's on the hunt for one night of hot sex before she goes on trial for embezzlement, Erica needs to be alluring. She also wants to be anyone but herself, to become a wild woman with no cares. The fact she bought her dress at Goodwill reveals her financial crisis.

• Lachlan. He dons a kilt, a skintight black T-shirt, and combat boots. Ever the proud Scotsman, he is wearing his family tartan to show off his heritage and because it's kilt night at the club. His black shirt signifies—though I never say this in the book—his dark mood following a traumatic period in his life. His boots are also a sign he feels vulnerable, and when manly men feel vulnerable they tend to put on an air of bravado. Lachlan does this with his clothes. Plus, he just looks hot in black.

Lachlan wears the kilt again in other important scenes in the book, but I wouldn't want to spoil the surprise by telling you which ones! Clothes may not be the cornerstone of my stories, but they do set the mood and aid in character development. Everything I say about a character needs to feed into their personality or the story in some way. I say, never waste space on carelessly chosen words when you could employ them for a purpose.

Blurb for Dangerous in a Kilt:

Good-girl Erica Teague is out on bail, charged with a crime her ex-lover committed. Her desperate bid to experience one wild night of sizzling sex, before her trial and certain conviction, lands her in the arms of Lachlan MacTaggart, a hot Scot with a secret past. She can't resist his offer to enjoy one month of sex and companionship with no strings. But when their hot fling gets personal, can their passion free their imprisoned hearts?

Buy Links:

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01LZ9523F

AllRomance: https://www.allromanceebooks.com/product-dangerousinakilt-2092621-149.html

Barnes and Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/dangerous-in-a-kilt-anna-durand/1124468823?ean=2940153695815

iBooks: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/dangerous-in-a-kilt/id1147897435

Kobo: https://store.kobobooks.com/en-us/ebook/dangerous-in-a-kilt

Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Anna_Durand_Dangerous_in_a_Kilt?id=7z4ZDQAAQBAJ

Excerpt:

I swigged my brandy. A flash of fruity sweetness raced over my tongue, chased by a tangy burn. Why was I waiting for a man who didn't have the courtesy to call and cancel? Enough of this. I leaped off the stool onto my five-inch heels and tottered, mirroring my stool's motion. What the hell had I been thinking, wearing stilettos for the first time in my life?

Strong hands grasped my upper arms. "Easy there."

I craned my neck to behold my would-be savior. My heart thudded.

A giant of a man peered down into my eyes, his body towering several inches above me. Whoa, mama. The heels elevated my five-four to five-ten, which must've made him well over six feet tall. Thick muscles in his impossibly broad shoulders flexed as he maintained his hold on me. The lights glistened on his short, dark hair, casting it in unearthly hues. The sensation of his fingers on my skin and the proximity of his body flooded me with heat and my mouth watered at the sight of acres of hard, defined muscles straining his skintight black T-shirt. His powerful thighs vanished under a kilt, its plaid woven in pastel shades of green and blue with orange lines threaded through them. The blue in the fabric echoed his pale eyes, which studied me with electrifying interest. Black combat boots covered his feet but somehow, combined with his angular features, they lent him a rugged appeal.

I raked my gaze over his body, drinking in every inch of him, until our gazes intersected.

Recognition lit his face. "It's you. Erica."

"And it's you." Who the hell was he? The guy seemed to know me but—Ohhhh. This must be Cliff. I shook off his hands, whipped out my phone, and tapped the clock on its screen, tipping it so he could see. "It's eight thirty-nine."

His full lips quirked. "Quite the timekeeper, eh?"

That deep voice, spiced with an enticing Scottish brogue, flowed over the words like warm molasses. Forget his yummy accent. You're a wild woman and wild women don't wait around for late-comers. I shook off his hands. "I've been here for thirty-nine minutes. Doesn't that mean anything to you?"

"Not really." His attentive gaze browsed over me. "Except your bum's oot the windae."

He was speaking gibberish. Great, I'd arranged a sex date with a lunatic.

"Buckled, are you?"

I spread my arms. "Do you see any buckles or belts on this dress?"

He chuckled—with no derision, simply amusement. "I meant are you drunk, lass?"

"Me?" I snorted, waving a dismissive hand. "No. Never."

Besides, I'd had just one sip of brandy.

He leaned in to stare straight into my eyes. His glacial blue irises sparkled in the light glinting off them. I caught a whiff of his rich, dark cologne and underneath, an earthy spice all his own. My senses came alive at the exotic scent of him, and the flecks of darker blue in those striking eyes mesmerized me. I swallowed. Hard.

Author Bio:

Anna Durand is an award-winning romance writer specializing in steamy romances populated with spunky heroines and hunky heroes, in settings as diverse as modern Chicago and the fairy realm. Her romances have to date won eight awards and Dangerous in a Kilt was chosen as a Top Pick by The Romance Reviews. When she's not writing, Anna runs a cataloging services business and plays with puppies as often as possible.

Social Media Links:

Website: http://www.annadurand.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheAnnaDurand

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AnnaDurandFiction

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/annadurand

Google+: https://plus.google.com/+AnnaDurandFiction/

Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/Anna_Durand/

Amazon Author Page: http://www.amazon.com/author/annadurand