Drea Braddock's Blog, page 3

Coming Soon!

I'm finalizing edits, tweaking the cover, and doing all my mundane behind the scenes work to get my FIRST full-length novel--and the first in the O‘ahu Naval Officers Series--into your hands! I cannot wait for you to experience Norah's love story!

"Like a Good Neighbor"

She may hate to admit that she wants him, but he could be the one man she truly needs.

Hawai‘i may have lush green mountains and gorgeous beaches but I’m here for one thing and one thing only: my job. I plan on spending my time on O‘ahu becoming the best Navy Surface Warfare Officer I can be. Not the best female officer, the best officer, full stop, thank you very much. Nothing is going to pull my focus, least of all the 6’5” wall of native Hawaiian muscle next door. Every look from his chocolatey eyes may set my body on fire but he also pisses me off more than anyone I’ve ever met.

I’m a driven, successful woman and I don’t have time for the likes of Ka‘eo Maheloha with his flirty smile and carefree vibe. I don’t like to fail and I sure as hell don’t like to be vulnerable. Shouldn’t the universe understand that someone so laid back and charming isn’t a good match for me and stop pushing us together? Because love isn’t something I want to get wrong, again. But if Ka‘eo and I together are wrong, then why does every moment we’re close feel so very right?

All I know is I’m not sure how to be who I’m supposed to be and protect my heart at the same time.

Did you know I've started a Book Club? Join me! I think "Like a Good Neighbor" would be a good one to start with! This is a new program offered by Amazon, and it's still in beta testing. I think they're still working out the kinks but I'm excited to have a place to connect with readers!

You're Simply the Best!

I'm still trying to come to terms with my baby novella being out in the world! It's so crazy and awesome to know that people are reading about Fern and Deacon and falling for them as hard as I did! Thank you so much, dear readers, for giving me a chance!

There's a lot on the horizon! I'm prepping my first full-length book, Norah's story, "Like a Good Neighbor." That means I'm deep in the trenches of final edits. There's also the cover, the blurb, author headshots, my newsletter... my ADHD brain is tied to my calendar right now so I don't miss anything!

Where does that leave you, my friends and first readers? Hopefully anxiously awaiting Norah Pierson's love story! In the meantime, the biggest, most helpful and WONDERFUL you can do for me is leave a review!

On Amazon, you are required to leave a small number of words with a star review. Or, if you're on Goodreads, you can leave just a star review, a written review, or both! Everything helps! As a reader, if I'm considering a book from a new-to-me-author, the first thing I do is check reviews so I know what kind of story I'm in for. Good or bad, knowing what other readers thought helps me.

Shout out to my friend Beth! I love her for a myriad of reasons and now added to that list is the fact that she is will forever be immortalized as my first book review! I took a screenshot of this bad boy and will keep it forever! That's scrapbook material baby!

Cover Reveal!

Here's the first look at the cover for "One Night in Waikiki."

It's almost time to share this novella with the world! I'm so excited for you to meet Fern & Deacon! This quick read is an introduction to my O‘ahu Naval Officers Series. Here's a little excerpt to wet your whistle!

“So that was your ex, huh? The Snaggletooth guy you told me about? Why exactly does he call you something unkind and unflattering while trying to get you to see him again?” I open her door for her, waiting to shut it until she’s sitting.

“He doesn’t mean it that way. It’s just, you know, my overlapping teeth and orange hair.” She gestures towards herself flippantly. I frown.

“Except it’s critical and unnecessary. You have a great smile and your hair is not orange. If he likes you, why wouldn’t he make it a point to tell you the things about you that he’s into instead of making you the butt of an inside joke?” She squirms in her seat, knotting her fingers together. I navigate us out of the parking lot and head off base.

“He could have called you Freyja, the Norse goddess of love and beauty. She was also called The Shining One and is a redhead that’s been worshipped throughout history for her beauty and wisdom. He could have come up with something that would always remind you of something intimate between the two of you.” I reach across and gently pull her hands apart, weaving our fingers together. She squeezes lightly, angling her body towards me.

“Hell, he could outright compliment you, foregoing the juvenile nicknames completely. Instead he chose to belittle you. If it were me, I might point out that your eyes are the color of the Irish moss that grows in Louisville. I could mention any number of things I like about your body. It would be hard to choose only one, Fern.” She dips her head slightly, a light pink flush blooming on her cheeks. “Maybe I’d admit that I find you effortlessly sexy and I’ve replayed Saturday night a thousand times in my head. But that’s just me. I was never the guy who pulled a girl’s pigtails to get her to notice me. My Mamaw always told me a spoonful of honey was more effective than a gallon of vinegar.”

“You’re certainly generous with the honey.” I sneak a glance at her while stopped at a red light. She’s no longer tense and there’s a soft smile on her lips. Mamaw is always right.

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Random Acts of Awkward

Recently, while at the beach with friends, it was pointed out to me that we (my kids and I) randomly compliment people a lot. It's not on accident but I suppose it can take some getting used to. This habit comes from a couple of different places. One: our middle kid, Teddy, is everyone's hype man. He has always been very affectionate and supportive. He's the first to tell his sisters they look pretty, to praise a sibling's artwork and to lift someone up verbally that's struggling. No joke, every time we lift weights, Teddy cruises through the carport and calls out things like "You've got this, Mom!" I wish I had his gift for easy, heartfelt compliments! Everyone needs a Teddy in their life. Having someone like that in the house makes all of us aware of the power of a well placed kind word.

The second reason is a little more...

sensitive. For the sake of not calling anyone out or bad-mouthing a friend publicly, I'll be vague. In my past, there was someone that unintentionally made my relationship with a dear friend very competitive. My grandmother acted similarly concerning my cousins. (I don't mind diming Grandma out because she's gone and I don't mean it hatefully.) We rarely heard from Grandma and saw her even less. On the couple of occasions we did speak on the phone or receive letters, she spent the entire time talking about our cousins. They were so cute, so funny, and doing amazing things. My cousin Jennifer "could have been a model, she's so tall," and my cousin Taylor could do no wrong and was so close to Grandma she even had her own special name for her. Yay for them. She didn't ask us questions about what was going on in our life and she certainly never said kind things about us. I resented my cousins for their many talents and their relationship with her. Closer to home, I constantly heard about how great this friend was: so pretty, thin, dainty feet, very talented, so well liked by everyone, always making friends, and on and on and on. She was all of those things! What made it hard, though, was that I never heard good things about myself. If she was thin and delicate, in comparison I was "sturdier" with "big bones." I was reminded that I was too shy, had massively wide feet, cankles, looked terrible in pink, and countless other tiny criticisms that I fight against to this day. These were never said in a mean way. It was more like, you should be honest about what you're dealing with. I didn't learn until much, much later that the friend had the same experience, but about me! I'll never know what the reasoning was behind it, but this person only ever built us up to each other. I never heard any of the nice things said about me and she never heard any of the nice things said about her. We were pitted against each other, constantly comparing ourselves to the other girl and feeling like there was nothing good to say about us. Sad, right?

As an adult, I started to notice how easy and automatic it was to say nice things about other people out of their hearing. For one, the church we've been a part of for the almost 7 years we've lived on Oahu is very non-catty. I've lived places where the gossip mill is pervasive and lethal, where "Christian" women stand together in small groups and tear each other apart for sport. Hearing "bless her heart" in any tone other than sarcasm gives me PTSD. As a youth minister's wife I received hate mail in the form of a photocopied article about "How You Can Tell You're a Snob" with a handwritten note telling me that I should read more to find out why no one liked me! Jesus would be proud. Not so in our church family. With the women in my church, there is a real, active effort put into speaking life and love into the people around us. You'll never hear one of them complaining about their husbands! In some ways, it can feel inauthentic at times for this enneagram 4 who desperately needs to be able to talk about the good and the bad, the hard and the wonderful. But it's done out of love for good reasons and I digress. It's very natural and familiar to have a friend leave the group and immediately hear things like "Doesn't that color look great on her?" or "I love her hair like that!" It's a wonderful place to nurture relationships and I love that my kids have these adults modeling friendships for them! It did occur to me, though, that the one person that might like to hear those compliments most was the person we were speaking about; the person who had just walked away!

So, as a general rule, the Braddocks like to tell people the nice things we're thinking about them, when we think them. I'm not going to lie, it can be awkward. We're genuine but not particularly smooth. I think of them as my Random Acts of Awkward, especially when it involves strangers. It hasn't happened often, but I have had total strangers say something unexpectedly kind to me before and it 100% made my day. It shouldn't be this way but my husband telling me I look nice doesn't have the same impact because he's stuck with me! Of course I want him to think I'm pretty and I definitely want him to say it, but he's said it at some incredibly questionable times over the years so I don't entirely trust his judgement. He thought I was pretty when I gained 75 pounds and incredibly swollen with an intense about of water weight while pregnant with our first! He loves me. His love goggles don't have the same impact as a total stranger, like the teenage guy working at Starbucks, telling me my hair is bad ass! That dude has no reason to say ANYTHING nice to me! I'm storing it up in my mind vault and trotting that sucker out every time I'm feeling fragile!

Considering I feel that way, it stands to reason that other people should too. Enter me, yelling out my window at a woman running that she looks awesome in her leggings. I'm not sure she appreciated it. I'm going to tell myself she did though. She did look awesome though and I thought she should know it! I've also yelled at a high schooler walking along the road that he has amazing hair. He looked scared. I stand by my assessment though. His hair was killah. Sometimes it's more successful, like the older lady at the library with a sassy haircut full of wild curls. When I told her I loved her hair her smile lit up the room and she admitted she had just decided it was time to work with her natural hair texture. Well, it more than works, my friend, your hair is amazing!

Because I'm me, I took this one step further. I started to think about those little random acts of kindness in terms of a story. What kind of person might need little, anonymous kind words to tell others what she noticed? And what might happen if she reached out to someone in their moment of greatest emotional need, and she found someone who could truly see her? How might a broken, hurting man and a woman who hides behind the safe wall of her anonymous good deeds allow themselves to be vulnerable enough to have something real together? This was the first book that I wrote and is the story closest to my heart. I love these characters and the journey they take! It's also the only book I've written that isn't set in Hawaii so I'm still debating where it's release should fit in the order of things. I've been tentatively calling it "Random Notes of Kindness," but I can't decide if I hate the title or not. What do you think? Anyone have a better title for an emotional love story about a meet cute involving anonymous notecards, volunteer work, and a found family in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia?

Why Romance?

It all started with Anne. I loved reading before her but in Anne I found a "kindred spirit." I admired her intellect, her authenticity, her whimsy and I fell in love with her world. (Maybe one day I'll share all the nods to my love of Anne in my real life.) Anne's world is full of love: love of family, love in friendship, love of beauty and knowledge, and romantic love. Anne was my first introduction to a slow burn, enemies to friends and then friends to lovers, love story. Gah, to this day I still swoon at Gilbert's proposal!

Later I branched off, enjoying stories that scared me, thrilled me, and took me to new, faraway places. Horror, mysteries, sci-fi, fantasy, YA, chick lit...I've always been an equal opportunity devourer of fictional realms. Or at least I was, until 2020.

I don't know if my experience in the midst of the global pandemic was, like so many others,' because of what was happening around me or if it was just coincidental timing. Unlike most, our day to day life didn't change that much. Living on the island of Oahu, we're pretty separate from the rest of the world already. We've homeschooled for the last 7 years, so our day to day schedule wasn't affected by the world shutting down. School and spending time together at home was exactly the same. Because my husband is in the Navy, he still went to work and we were fortunate enough to never have to worry about his paycheck. There were a few months when he was quarantined to the ship, at the pier, which was hard on all of us, but we were very lucky. I'm not a worrier by nature. I wasn't panicked about getting COVID and I wasn't battling the sudden isolation of being alone at home with my kids. In fact, things could have been construed as better. I didn't have to spend hours driving kids to and from activities, I no longer had to go to the grocery stores (a chore I loathe), and we slowed down and enjoyed our time together. I played guitar, we painted, played video games and board games and read A LOT of books together. There was just one small problem, I was battling overwhelming, non-stop anxiety.

Anxiety was not entirely new to me. I've dealt with panic attacks in the past, but they always stemmed from something tangible. My reaction didn't make sense, but I knew what was causing it. There was a period where riding in a car would send me spiraling. I could perfectly picture the myriad of ways that we could die while driving. I didn't want to but I couldn't stop. I remember vividly scaring my dad as he drove us through the mountain roads in California, crying hysterically, hyperventilating, my head squeezed down between my knees. He wasn't driving recklessly at all. My reaction did not fit the situation. But I knew the car ride was the issue. In 2020, there was no catalyst. I wasn't set off by something in particular, I wasn't worried, I didn't have any reason to be scared but I felt an internal sense of dread all the time. My heart would race, I'd get light-headed, I'd have to fight off crying and freaking out. It scared me. Even stranger, reading often made it worse. I could no longer read thrillers or horror. Anything remotely scary or tense was too much for me. Even if I could handle the story itself, getting interrupted--something that is guaranteed when you're at home with 5 kids--would send me into an emotional tailspin because I couldn't resolve the tension in the story. If the book was too thick, the story too complex, then I wouldn't be able to read it in one sitting and I would worry about the characters and stress about the unknown until I felt physically ill. I know, it's ridiculous. I knew then that it was ridiculous, but that didn't stop my erratic pulse or my constantly clenched stomach.

I had the same problem with tv shows. I could no longer handle anything too scary or intense. I started watching Hallmark style Christmas movies in October. The stories were tame and often predictable. They were happy. Safe. I didn't feel anxious watching them. Sure, I found it annoying that there was so much emotional build up for one lame kiss 5 seconds before the end credits, but I didn't feel like I was dying so it was a win. I also started reading cozy mysteries. Quirky characters, violence and crime happen "off screen," again: safe. In November, around the same time I went to the ER thinking I was having a heart attack (it was just my first panic attack entirely unrelated to anything, a whole new experience for me) I saw an ad on my kindle lock screen for a holiday love story and figured I'd give it a try. From that point until the end of the year, I read more than 130 books. Not only could I read romance without feeling physically ill from an irrational worry about the characters or the plot of the book, I enjoyed them! What's not to love about books that make you laugh, make you cry happy tears, and enforce the idea that a woman's feelings (in a relationship and in the bedroom) matter?! Plus, romance, by definition, always has a guaranteed Happily Ever After. I knew, no matter how tense things got, everything would work out in the end. I felt like a human being for the first time in a loooong time between that guarantee and a miracle prescription that not only got my 24-7 generalized anxiety under control but wiped out depression that was so much a part of my life I didn't even know I was feeling it anymore. Guys, I legit didn't remember what it was like to be happy! When we finally hit on the right dosage, it was like stepping out of a deep, dark cave to the unreal beauty of a Hawaiian sunset! Or like when you get glasses for the first time and all you can think is, "wait, everyone else is just walking around seeing things this clearly?!" Depression and a shitty memory from unmedicated Inattentive ADHD for the win...or not.

Still with me? It's worth pointing out, if you haven't abandoned ship yet, that my husband has been gently pushing me to write for years. He knew how much I wanted to but I couldn't. Fear of failure, convinced I had no worthwhile ideas, you name it I used it to excuse my inaction. So, in that annoying way that permeates most of our relationship, he bugged me about it just enough that I knew he hadn't forgotten and still thought I should give myself a chance. He loves and supports persistently, even though I'm usually very resistant and a real jerk about it. It's kind of our thing. In February of 2021, I forgot all the reasons why I was too scared to try. I was feeling better than I had in a good decade or more. I had ideas, I could carve out time, why not take a chance on myself? I started getting up a few hours earlier than my kids (this is not hard, 4/5th of them are NOT morning people) and in a week, I had a book. A real deal, so proud I could cry novel! And then I had a second, and a third...until I had six completed books, a novella, and a bunch of ideas knocking around my head.

For a while, I was too scared to tell anyone. It wasn't because I wasn't proud or didn't think they were very good, though. It was because I'm so happy with the work and the end results and I simply don't have it in me to deal with anyone else's bullshit anymore. I didn't have the energy to refute the nonsense that romance isn't "real" reading or is just "mommy porn" or garbage lit. I didn't want to have to think about people looking at me differently because of what I wrote. I get preemptively angry just thinking about it. For one, I know the people that never had a problem with me reading Stephen King at 12 would 100% judge me for writing romance. Because swearing and sex is fine as long as there is also violence, death, and the absolute worst of humanity. But if you have those two things in a story about growing emotionally with someone and pushing past life's obstacles to grab your happy ending, then it's trash. Makes sense, right?

Here's what I know, friends: I LOVE love stories! I love emotionally complex people. I love found families. I love real, deep connections and witty banter. I love sex and happily ever afters. I love reading those stories. I love writing those stories. And over the last few months, love stories (and miraculous pharmaceuticals that helped my effed up brain chemistry) helped me find my way back to myself, find my own voice, and find a new title.

I'm Drea Braddock. I'm a Navy wife, a tattooed mom of 5, a mediocre at best homeschooling mom, a worship band singer and guitar player, an avid reader, an introvert smart ass, an enneagram 4, an awkward friend, and I am a romance writer.

Photo of my 14 year old daughter by: Annie Groves Photography