Laura Florand's Blog, page 8

Snippet (Paris Hearts 2)

The lovely Elyssa Patrick​ tagged me to share 7 lines from page 7 of my work in progress.

You know, I am *very* stingy about sharing from my works in progress, but Elyssa is a sweetheart, and I thought some of you might enjoy it, so here you go. This is from Violette’s story, book 2 in the Paris Hearts series.

(YES, I am also working on Tristan and Lucien’s stories. But I can only write so fast, y’all! I’m glad you’re interested in them, though, and appreciate that very much.)

Hope you enjoy!

***

Her burglar grinned like a cat that had rolled in way too much catnip. “I hope you won’t take this the wrong way, but you are really hot.”

“Is there a good way to take that?” she challenged dryly.

“Well…as a compliment? I mean, if you told me that, that’s the way I would take it.”

She sighed, wishing his cockiness and physical strength and visible attraction to her didn’t get to her the way they did. The last thing a female chef needed was to be vulnerable to that particular male combination. She’d never hold her own. “Did Quentin send you to sabotage tomorrow’s banquet?”

A little of the grin faded off his face. He straightened away from the wall. In the light, his hair was a kind of blue-brown, his skin faintly ghostly. “Who’s Quentin?”

“He was my second.”

Her burglar’s eyes narrowed just a little. It changed the whole look of his face, from cocky and dangerous to her equilibrium to just…dangerous. To everybody else. “Was?”

She shrugged, as if this kind of thing didn’t hurt every time. Why the hell did men have to make it so hard to do her job? As if everything in life was all about them and their wants, all the time? “Well, since I’m a woman, obviously he thought he was the real star in the kitchen and that I was just some figurehead who was sleeping with the hotel owner.”

Her burglar held up one finger. “Just a little point of interest, and not to distract your story, but are you sleeping with the hotel owner?”

She gave him a withering look.

He smiled. “Good.”

A Trip Back in Time

My daughter wanted to take pictures of me in my wedding dress last night. This is the one I tried to throw out the window in Blame It on Paris.

Thanks to all that weight-lifting**, it of course no longer closes all the way up the back.

**That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Friday Book Club!

What are you reading this week?

I finally read Uprooted by Naomi Novik (http://amzn.to/1N7xZ2m?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss), which was just lovely. I highly recommend it if you read fantasy at all. Thank you all for all the recommends of this one!

And I just started Nalini Singh‘s newest, Archangel’s Enigma (http://amzn.to/1Nf5stq?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss), last night, and of course kept reading waaaay past when I should turn the lights out. Naasir is priceless! I love him.

What about you? Anything you recommend? Anything you’re looking forward to?

Thought you would enjoy this cupcake photo in honor of Friday Book Club!

A Wish Upon Jasmine–it’s official! :)

It’s the official book birthday of A WISH UPON JASMINE! (We had planned to release it this week.)

I hope you enjoyed meeting Damien and Jess a little early!

A huge thank you to all of you who took them with you on your vacation and wrote to me! I really did not know how you would take to Damien–he’s so different from Matt!–but I knew he needed someone to love him. To believe in him?

Thanks so much for sharing this story with me!

 

Amazon: http://lauraflorand.com/wishuponjasmine_amazon/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
iBooks: http://lauraflorand.com/wishuponjasmine_apple/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
Nook: http://lauraflorand.com/wishuponjasmine_bn/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
Kobo: http://lauraflorand.com/wishuponjasmine_kobo/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
Google: http://lauraflorand.com/wishuponjasmine_google/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss

Friday Book Club!

Friday Book Club! What are you reading?

I was just reading My Father’s Dragon with my daughter (from our discussion of children’s books), and it’s very charming. (Although maybe with darker moments than we’re used to anymore–poor baby dragon! But the little boy is off to rescue him.)

And I just finished NO EASY DAY. I find memoirs/autobiographical accounts like this absolutely fascinating–this insight into a mindset and life so different from my own. (Like, I have a very great difficulty imagining myself chomping at the bit, frustrated and restless in an airport, because if that plane doesn’t take off soon I might miss this amazing chance to go parachute into freezing cold water, board a ship held by pirates, and get shot at. There are some amazing differences in humans, aren’t there?)

I’m also over at Ellie Reads Fiction talking about some books I’ve loved this summer, and some other favorite things. Come share your own!

What about you? What are you reading? Anything you recommend? Anything you’re looking forward to this weekend?

Chocolate Cup Giveaway and Brainstorming

Giveaway! OK, we are almost out of these cups. So I’m going to give one more of the precious few remaining away, but in return you have to tell me what you think.

Should I make more?

Is there something else you think would be fun? (Notepads? Buttons? Something else?)

A different quote?

What would be fun for you?

Fire away!

The Chocolate Rose, New Cover

Yay! We have a new cover for THE CHOCOLATE ROSE!

 

And some of you will be happy to see that we are keeping the original title. Why? Well, we ran some marketing tests with various titles suggested. (Your jaw is dropping that I know how to run marketing tests, isn’t it? The things you have to learn just because you want to write books. Sigh. Where is that blasted ivory tower I’m supposed to be able to hide in while I weave my stories?)

Anyway, we ran the original title up against some personal favorites, such as Melt Into Me and Prince at Heart, and found that exactly 1% fewer people liked the title The Chocolate Rose. That did not seem sufficient grounds to confuse everyone for years about which book was which. So we are keeping the original title.

But I hope you like this new cover! (I will go ahead and tell you that the marketing tests showed a HUGE difference on the two covers. So with my humble apologies to everyone who prefers object covers…)

Also, an enormous THANK YOU to everyone who helped brainstorm titles! Since we ended up keeping the first one, we got random.org to pick the number of the commenter who gets the cup, and that person is…DALE! Which is kind of funny, because I had wanted to give Dale and Mercy two of the cups when we were able to meet up at RWA, but by then all the ones I had with me had gotten wiped out. (We seriously underestimated how many people would come to the signings and I started handing out cups in apology when the books ran out.)

Adventures in Cake Baking (plus giveaway)

Giveaway happening! (Link below.)

So you know that big professional writer’s conference last week? RWA? Well, you know what I did during it, right?

I slipped away to make cake. This is all Jeannie Lin’s​ fault! She saw a workshop offering from Momofuku in Brooklyn and she emailed me as the “only person crazy enough to run off from the conference to do this with her”. (Hey. How am I supposed to take that? She barely even knows how crazy I am! Err…wait. That did not come out right.)

Anyway, no worries, because *I* of course could immediately think of another person that crazy or, in my own perspective, interested in the finer things in life, and I asked Elisabeth at Cooking Up Romance​ if she would like to come, too. And she did!

So went into Brooklyn, made our cakes, and then, of course, bethought ourselves of the fact that we all now had cakes we couldn’t take on the plane the next day. So there we were, in the lounge of the hotel, trying to give away cake slices. (This was surprisingly hard to do. I am concerned about people, I really am.)

Here I am with my cake, photo courtesy of Ana C. of the Immersed in Books​ blog.

And for more details of our adventures, you can go see the Cooking Up Romance blog, where Elisabeth has posted more info and is also hosting a giveaway of either THE CHOCOLATE THIEF or A WISH UPON JASMINE, your choice.

NPR names The Chocolate Kiss one of Top 100 Romances!

I’m really overwhelmed to be able to say that THE CHOCOLATE KISS is on NPR’s list of Top 100 Romances.

Seeing it on the list between authors like Jennifer Crusie and Linda Howard and Nora Roberts–books I have loved and considered among my top favorite romances since I was a teenager!–just really makes me want to cry. (And those are just some of the favorite authors in contemporary. In some other fields, we’ve got Mary Stewart’s Nine Coaches Waiting!! Outlander, The Lord of Scoundrels…. It is *incredible* to me to have a book included on that list.)

I’m very, very honored. THANK you so much to all the readers who nominated The Chocolate Kiss.

If you haven’t read it yet and would like to, Kensington has very fortunately put it on sale for $2.99 this week ($2.51 on Amazon). If you’re newly discovering it, I hope you enjoy it! And again, THANK YOU to all the readers who helped put it on this list! I’m truly overwhelmed.

A Wish Upon Jasmine is live!

Damien is here! Ruthless. Wealthy. Merciless. And head over heels.

***

Just for a second, standing a few centimeters from his chest, Jess looked up at him, so vulnerable that Damien wanted to soften. (It’s all right. Remember? Remember me?)

She went up onto her tiptoes and rested her hands on his chest to balance as she took a breath of the hollow of his throat.

And after that he didn’t have a soft cell left in his body.

Everything about him went hard and hungry and determined to get what he wanted.

***

A WISH UPON JASMINE, book 2 in La Vie en Roses series!

Amazon: http://lauraflorand.com/wishuponjasmine_amazon/

iBooks: http://lauraflorand.com/wishuponjasmine_apple/

Barnes & Noble: http://lauraflorand.com/wishuponjasmine_bn/

Kobo: http://lauraflorand.com/wishuponjasmine_kobo/

Google: http://lauraflorand.com/wishuponjasmine_google/