Carly Phillips's Blog: Carly's Web Blogs, page 87
June 23, 2012
What’cha Reading Saturday!

I’m waiting for the new Toni Blake, and in the meantime I’m still glomming Kristen Ashley! How about you? What’cha reading these days?
June 22, 2012
Friday (Birthday) Giveaway

Today is JULIE LETO’S Birthday!!!!!! We can’t let it pass without a celebration because WE LOVE YOU, JULIE!
Since I’m a leave it to the imagination kind of gal, you can all imagine whoever you want here. Especially you, JULIE!
It’s also a contest day, so I’m offering a $25 Amazon G.C. to one lucky winner.
Comment and wish Julie a HAPPY BIRTHDAY for a chance to win!
June 21, 2012
Welcome Guest Ruthie Knox!

PLEASE give a warm jungle welcome to guest author, RUTHIE KNOX who has her second Loveswept eBook out NOW! It’s already on my iPad … just waiting for time to read because I loved her first book, RIDE WITH ME. Here’s what I said about that one: “A sweet yet sultry, honest and heart-tugging ride. Everything a love story should be!” Carly Phillips, New York Times Bestselling Author. Ruthie’s going to talk about Book Boyfriends (YUM!)
My Book Boyfriend
We all have him — that one romance hero who just turns our crank like no other. Singes our socks. Jumps our battery. Reduces our girl-bits to quivering masses of . . . you get the idea. Our number-one book boyfriend, with whom we’d gladly commit infidelities and possibly even perversions never before contemplated.
That is, if he were a real man, as opposed to a collection of words on our e-readers. ;-)
I am ashamed to admit that I think my first book boyfriend was Jondalar from Jean M. Auel’s Clan of the Cave Bear books. Did any of you read those? I did — at far too young and impressionable an age — and ol’ Jondalar introduced me to the joys of graphic sex in fictional form. Plus, he was a real sweetie, a good hunter, an excellent flint-knapper, and he had some moves in the sack.
But it wasn’t until I started reading romance as a grown up that I found the really good book boyfriends. Like, say, Ford in Jill Shalvis’s The Sweetest Thing. Did you guys read that book? I can’t even think of him as Ford. In my head, he will always be OMFG FORD, because that is how hot he is. Or how about Jake in Leslie Kelly’s Slow Hands? Patient, down-to-earth, dirty-talking rescue worker? Sign. Me. Up.
One of the best parts of writing romance is that I get to make those men — to come up with the single hottest guy I can imagine from the ground up. It’s so much fun! What does he look like, how does he think, how does he talk, what’s quirky about him, what wound does he have that needs fixin’ … I can honestly say I’ve been head over heels for every single hero I’ve created.
Of course, I always like the most recent one best. My second novel, About Last Night, released just over a week ago, and yesterday I saw a review that said about the hero, “Nev, Nev, Nev…*sigh* That is all.” And I just beamed, because I feel that way every time I think about Nev. I’m crazy about the guy. Nev is a buttoned-up Englishman, a banker from the upper crust, and when the heroine, Cath, sees him on her daily commute into London, she pegs him as a Boy Scout. Too good, too tame, too predictable for a wild child like her. Oh, ladies, she is soooooo wrong. That’s all I’m saying.
Writing a book boyfriend is kind of like having a baby and a crush on a movie star all at once — I just want to dish about him over margaritas with six of my best friends. Isn’t he dreamy? Remember that part where he said … ohmigod. And that other time when he … *dies*
It’s the best job ever.
So how about y’all? Tell me your top three favorite book boyfriends!
GIVEAWAY:
Leave a comment to enter, and I’ll give away three copies of About Last Night to randomly chosen winners, announced on Sunday!
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ABOUT LAST NIGHT – available NOW! (eBook)
Loveswept (Random House)
Sure, opposites attract, but in this sexy, smart eBook original romance from Ruthie Knox, they positively combust! When a buttoned-up banker falls for a bad girl, “about last night” is just the beginning.
Cath Talarico knows a mistake when she makes it, and God knows she’s made her share. So many, in fact, that this Chicago girl knows London is her last, best shot at starting over. But bad habits are hard to break, and soon Cath finds herself back where she has vowed never to go . . . in the bed of a man who is all kinds of wrong: too rich, too classy, too uptight for a free-spirited troublemaker like her.
Nev Chamberlain feels trapped and miserable in his family’s banking empire. But beneath his pinstripes is an artist and bohemian struggling to break free and lose control. Mary Catherine — even her name turns him on — with her tattoos, her secrets, and her gamine, sex-starved body, unleashes all kinds of fantasies.
When blue blood mixes with bad blood, can a couple that is definitely wrong for each other ever be perfectly right? And with a little luck and a lot of love, can they make last night last a lifetime?
Order links — only $2.99
Other links
Book page at Random House
Book page at Goodreads
Follow @ruthieknox on Twitter
June 14, 2012
.TXT Reminders of Carly Phillips Books – & a Neil Diamond Peek!

As authors, we are constantly looking for ways to remind readers we have a new book out. When I saw that another author had text message reminders, I wondered if people would want them or be annoyed by them. I asked on Facebook and was pleasantly shocked to get about 100 people who said they’d love a one time text reminder when I have a book release. Since I could have any from 2-4 books a year, that would be the maximum amount of texts you’d receive if you signed up. So I’m offering the opportunity for you to be reminded via .TxT!
SUBSCRIBE:
TEXT Message Reminders of CARLY PHILLIPS BOOKS!
Visit my home page:
www.carlyphillips.com
go to right hand side, midway down page and sign up to receive a text message reminder when I have a book release!
You will ONLY receive 1-4 text messages a year – depending on how many books I have out. 1 message/book!
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THIS past Fri night I went to a NEIL DIAMOND concert at Jones Beach. What a BLAST. The weather was amazing, my friends and I had fun, and Neil’s voice is as golden as ever! See for yourself!
So are you a NEIL fan like I am? And out of curiosity, did you/will you sign up for my TXT reminders?
June 7, 2012
RAGT12 – Lori Foster’s Reader Author Get Together

I was going to write a long long post about the weekend but I’ve had a stressful busy week, family stuff/issues/medical and otherwise, so I’m going to tell you the weekend was phenomenal, I had a great time meeting people, thank you Liza and Danielle for picking me up! Thanks Lori and Duffy and volunteers for a great event that is worth every penny! I’m sorry I can’t mention everyone I met by name. Here are photos …
Carly at the Booksigning

Carly and Author of Sultry w/a Twist, Macy Beckett

Toni Blake, Jill Shalvis, Carly

Jules Bennett and Carly

Blogger, Lisa Boggs and Carly

Liza Brown and Carly

Carly and Toni Blake
I hope all of you will consider this event next year … warning it fills up FAST once registration goes live!
June 3, 2012
Sunday Winner and Funny

The winner of Carly’s Friday Giveaway, a $25 Amazon G.C. is …
# 21 SUE G!
Congratulations!
Email me at: carly phillips @ mac . com (no spaces) to claim your prize!
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SUNDAY FUNNY
Digging into my own Facebook Page funnies for this one: So cute!
June 2, 2012
What’cha Reading Saturday

As I mentioned on Thursday, doesn’t reading seem like “feast or famine?” I went from having NO books to read to an iPad full! I’ve read and loved Jill Shalvis’ Lucky in Love, Bella Andre’s If You Were Mine, and a new to me author, Lilli Feisty’s Bound to Please – a very hot yet sweet love story that’s erotic romance. Sitting on my iPad? Nalini Singh’s Tangle of Need, Kristen Ashley’s Motorcycle Man, Larissa Ione’s Lethal Rider … none of which I can start because I KNOW I won’t be able to put them down and I don’t have time to just read – though I wish I did! What R You Reading?
I’m away at Lori Foster’s Reader and Author Get Together so talk w/out me! I’ll try to at least read if not check in here!
June 1, 2012
Carly’s Friday Giveaway

Have you picked up KARMA, the final book in the first Serendipity Trilogy?
Comment for a chance to win a $25 Amazon Gift card so you can! Or use it to buy whatever your heart desires!
HAPPY FRIDAY!
May 31, 2012
Mish Mosh

I’m leaving tomorrow for Lori Foster’s Reader and Author Get Together – it’s my first time going but I’ve heard great things about this weekend and I’m excited! There are so many familiar to me online people that I’ll get to meet in person and authors I haven’t seen in too long. So since my mind is on packing and getting ready, I’ll give you a short stream of what’s on my mind and you can pick and choose what to talk about!
In the middle of this craziness, I signed up to go to a Yoga class with my daughter tonight. I haven’t done Yoga in years. It never feels like I have time for any kind of working out and doing it takes time out of my busy day, but I’m going to give it a shot tonight.
I came up with an awesome idea for a short story I’m writing for Berkley, out next summer – Dr. Alexa Collins’ story (from Serendipity) – I wrote 16 pages and discovered that my editor was right when she said my synopsis sounded like a lot of story for a short, but if I could pull it off, great. Well, I can’t. Janelle and I both realized the other day that it has so much meat, it now has to become Erin’s story (you’ll meet Erin in the next Serendipity novel, Perfect Fit – she’s Sam Marsden’s sister). So now I have to rework Alexa’s short story because that comes first! Whew.
Doesn’t reading seem like “feast or famine?” I went from having NO books to read to an iPad full! I’ve read and loved Jill Shalvis’ Lucky in Love, Bella Andre’s If You Were Mine, and a new to me author, Lilli Feisty’s Bound to Please – a very hot yet sweet love story that’s erotic romance. Sitting on my iPad? Nalini Singh’s Tangle of Need, Kristen Ashley’s Motorcycle Man, Larissa Ione’s Lethal Rider … none of which I can start because I KNOW I won’t be able to put them down and I don’t have time to just read – though I wish I did! (I’m going to copy this paragraph again for Saturdays’ What R You Reading! lol).
So that’s about it for me. I hope to exercise, need time to read, have to sort out two books before I can write, and I’m off to Ohio! Be good while I’m gone! I’m leaving you with a weekend full of posts!
May 23, 2012
Guest Blogger Kristen Ashley

Let me start by saying I do not email or tweet about books and authors I love to get attention. It’s not about self-gratification. Contrary to popular belief (Janelle) I do not have stalker tendencies. (My emoticons don’t work when I’m creating posts but know there’d be a little grin after this!) What I do have is the memory of what it’s like to be starting out or even just writing in my bubble, feeling frustrated that it’s hard to reach new people, AND I have the heart of a reader. I’ve ALWAYS read but my real love affair with books began when I found Romance. So, now that I’ve reached a broad (but not broad enough IMO audience – b/c let’s face it, we all strive for more) – I have the driving need to contact authors whose works I find and love and tell them. Or to tweet about them. Or mention them on my FB page. I would hope that readers and authors would do the same for me. But I do it because I loved their books. I’m also always looking for new books to read – to that end – we always talk WHAT’RE YOU READING on Saturdays here – and sometime over the weekend, I ask the same question on my FB page, hoping to find a new – to – me author. One Saturday, someone said, “Carly, you must read the Dream Man series by Kristen Ashley.”
Who? So I headed to her website,(Click HERE to visit) browsed, then to Amazon, browsed some more, and downloaded Mystery Man on my Kindle. Let me be honest – these books had one big thing against them for me – First Person – usually a guaranteed NO READ for me – NOT ANY MORE. I started Mystery Man and I WAS HOOKED. Light. Fun. HOT ALPHA MEN. Did I mention HOT ALPHA MEN? A little insanity and MORE HOT ALPHA MEN. Kristen’s books are not short. They are LONG. And as she explains below, there are a lot of them because she wrote a ton before she published. This is excellent for me, who proceeded to GLOM all of the Dream Men books and then the ROCK CHICKS (do NOT miss the Rock Chicks and their men!). This Friday her next release, MOTORCYCLE MAN is out with Tack, who we met in a prior book. I can’t wait. And in the vein of the erotic romance frenzy, her current book, KNIGHT, is a very different take on a dominant man. HOT HOT HOT!
But I digress. (This has to be the LONGEST intro I’ve ever done for a guest blogger, LOL!) She talks about not getting writer’s block and I could hate her for that – except when you read her books, I think you’ll get why. She’s so uninhibited, her characters just FLOW.) I don’t hate her. I AM jealous though. Note – she loves CASTLE so she fits right in!
So anyway, give a warm jungle welcome to KRISTEN ASHLEY! And check out her books!
I never get writer’s block. I hesitate typing that because I’m certain doing it will mean I’ll put the whammie on myself. Still, it’s the truth. I never do.
Until a best-selling romance novelist invites me to be a guest blogger on her blog. When that happens, the ideas dry up.
So it came to me while driving a winding, English road, wracking my brain about blog ideas at the same time lamenting the news I read on Carly’s blog that Alcatraz is officially cancelled, yet gleeful The New Girl, Castle, Once Upon A Time, Grimm and the hot boy brothers Winchester of Supernatural will be back (yes, riding the emotional roller coaster, per usual).
And the idea that came to me amidst a head full of TV news: Carly Phillips asked me to be a guest blogger. I’ll write about that (in a way).
See, I started reading romance novels young. I mean young. I don’t even know how old I was. Maybe eleven. I’d steam through five, six Harlequins a week. I was a fixture at the library. I’d read anything. And love them. Favorites were Janet Daily and Penny Jordan. I graduated to Judith McNaught, Jude Devereaux and Johanna Lindsey. Then onto Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum which isn’t exactly romance but that doesn’t mean I’m not having a simultaneous love affair with Joe Morelli and Ranger.
Reading before bed as a young girl, I thought two things. One, I want with all my heart to be a romance novelist. And two, I figured I better have a “J” somewhere in my name if I wanted to be a good one.
What I didn’t realize was, living your dream doesn’t happen – KAPOW! A dream unfolds.
The “J” thing never happened. But some years ago, I started to put my stories down on the computer. I wrote and wrote and wrote. And by the time I finally self-published my first book, I had nearly twenty completed or nearly completed manuscripts on my computer.
Told you I didn’t get writer’s block. I also type fast.
Thus I embarked on a journey that was nail-biting, sometimes despairing, oftentimes self-questioning, but always underlying that, enjoyable.
It doesn’t happen just like that. You’ve heard it all before, it takes work, perseverance, yadda, yadda, yadda. But it’s not that. The process is slow and scary (but rewarding, though during the slow and scary parts, that’s hard to believe). Things happen. You get a reader. You get another one. Some fabulous blogger mentions you and introduces you to a bevy of folks. People follow you on Goodreads. People write to you and tell you what your stories mean to them. People follow you on Facebook and Twitter. Every day, the dream opens further, lighting your life, expanding your world. Then one day you wake up, make your coffee and oatmeal, sit down to your computer and get a message from a best-selling romance novelist telling you she enjoys your work and inviting you to be a guest blogger.
In your head, you think dreams are huge. But until you actually start living one, you can have no idea just how immense they are. Lying in bed all those years ago as a young girl wishing to spend my days weaving tales, I had absolutely no clue how enormous that dream would be once it came true. And as it’s coming true, I still don’t.
The thing is, you live your dream, it never ends and that’s the beauty of it. It gets bigger and bigger as each fold turns over and opens out but instead of this blocking out the light, it lets it in.
So here I sit, drinking coffee and writing a guest blog for a woman who does what I’ve always wanted to do and is a great success at it. And as I sit here, I’m pressing back another corner, expanding my world, letting in more light.
I wish for everyone that they can witness their own version of this beauty. But for me, I’d just like to say a heartfelt thanks to those who read my books for giving it to me. And to Carly, for shining more light down on me.
Fold back your dream, sisters. The light is awesome.
PS: Not too long ago, in an extraordinary turn of events, I was able to meet and get to know Penny Jordan, the novelist whose books fashioned my dream. She was a fabulous woman and will be missed for far more than her loss to our genre.
PPSS: And back to TV shows… For those who watch Castle, was that last episode not the bomb!? Holy cow! Talk about a rewind. Brilliant! I wanna be Kate Beckett when I grow up and only partially because the handsome and lovably goofy Richard Castle pushed her against a wall and kissed her. She rocks!
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The winner of Janelle’s giveaway from Monday is:
Jane (Comment #41)
Congrats, Jane! All you have to do to claim your prize is email me at janelledenison @ sbcglobal.net with your mailing info!