Sarina Bowen's Blog, page 33

Have you heard the latest episode of The Story Bites Podcast?

Hosted by Sarina Bowen & Tanya Eby

You guys! This is so much fun. Join me each week for a tasty story chapter and a chat with Tanya Eby!

Listen here:

Cover Reveal & Excerpt!

Coming January 22!

Pre-order at your favorite ebook vendor.

It’s happening! Overnight Sensation is coming your way! You can pre-order at Amazon | Apple | Kobo | Nook. Excerpt!

I’m used to being a good girl. I never refuse Daddy’s calls, and I never drink shots of tequila with the team in the bar.

Tonight, though? It’s time for a change. Take that, Daddy. And who knew I could slug back tequila like a party girl?

The problem is that I don’t know what to do next. I’ve never had a one-night stand. And every time Jason looks me up and down with those sinful eyes, I feel a little thrill of excitement.

And—fine—nerves. Although the tequila will help with that.

Besides, when you need a job done right, you’re supposed to hire an expert. And that’s what I want from Jason Castro. He’s the most notorious hookup artist on the team. He’s hot as blazes, and a real smooth-talker. I like everything about him, from his rich, bronze-toned skin to his hypnotic brown eyes.

He can talk me through it. I’m a quick study.

And I’m not a virgin. There have been boyfriends—four of them. But not one of them ever managed to… There’s no polite way to say it. Nice Southern girls aren’t supposed to speak in detail about sex. But let’s just say I’ve never been very satisfied by my sexual experiences so far.

So this is not an opportunity to be squandered. In fact, it’s time to up the ante. Just because I don’t have a whole lot of experience seducing men doesn’t mean I’m clueless about life in general.

Slowly, I ease my body a little closer to his. Two inches, maybe. Then I smile at him.

And—holy heck—the results are instantaneous. His eyes sweep down my body. And it’s almost as if he touched me with his hands, too. I feel that gaze burning me up everywhere it lands. Then he looks up again and gives me a hot smile. We’re having an entire conversation without words.

This is a revelation. I feel bold and a little wild.

“So what happens next, Hot Pepper?” he asks.

Oh my. That thumping sound is my heart taking off like a jackrabbit running a fifty-yard dash. I thought I had some more time to get used to the idea before we actually made our move.

“Are you gonna stay in Brooklyn and finish your internship, even if it causes family strife?”

“Oh,” I say slowly, because, whoops! I’m the one who’s gotten ahead. “I’ll stick with the internship. Heck, yes. I have no marketable skills.” My internship doesn’t pay very much. But I can live in Daddy’s Manhattan apartment and ride the subway to work.

“Good for you,” Jason says.

“It’s an easy decision,” I agree. “I need to start living differently, or I’m in danger of spending the rest of my life trying to please other people.”

“That’s no good,” he agrees. We’re still standing way too close together, and we’re still flirting. But I can tell he’s actually listening.

“I was deeply unhappy at school last year. And my parents didn’t care. You know what’s funny?” I can hear myself talking too much, but his attentiveness encourages me. “When I was a teenager I actually took classes on how to please people. It’s called charm school.”

His deep laugh vibrates through my belly. “To learn to be charming? I can already tell you got an A-plus.”

“That’s natural ability,” I tease. “But they taught us etiquette—which fork to use first and how to set a table for six courses. How to daintily remove an olive pit from your mouth. How to introduce two people when there’s an imbalance of power.”

“How do you do that?” he asks, leaning in just a few millimeters closer.

“You’re supposed to address the person of higher rank first. ‘Mr. Important Person, I would like to introduce Mr. Lesser-person.’ And then you offer any further details that are appropriate to the situation.” I can smell his aftershave. It’s clean and spicy. I have the strangest urge to lean in and kiss his angular jaw.

“Who knew?” He moves imperceptibly closer. “And now I’m wondering how many times I’ve been put in my place like that without realizing it.”

“Oh, please,” I tease him. “Try being the office intern for a day. I might as well wear a nametag that says, Hello My Name Is Lesser Person.”

“What else did they teach you at charm school?”

“How to foxtrot. The proper way to phrase a wedding invitation. Penmanship. How to dance with a boy you don’t like in order to save his feelings. In other words, how to be a good girl even when you don’t want to be.” The more I think about it, the more it sounds like brainwashing.

“Hmm,” Jason whispers. We’re so close together now that the word vibrates against my cheek. And then he leans in and lets his lips coast past my temple. It’s so faint that it can’t even be called a kiss. But it makes me shiver just the same.

No wonder this man gets any woman he wants. I’m practically quivering for him, and he hasn’t even kissed me.

Then his voice drops low, and he asks, “Would you rather be a bad girl, Heidi?”

Holy heck in a handbag! It’s the cheesiest line ever, but my girl parts shimmy all the same.

And then he puts his mouth right beside my ear. “Are you—” He drops his voice to barely a whisper. “—thinking of wearing white after Labor Day?”

Pre-order your copy at: Amazon | Apple | Kobo | Nook.

Big Giveaway! 15 Winners!

To celebrate the publication of Fireworks, 15 winners will take home a signed paperback or an audio book download!

Enter right here!

Books I Push On My Writer Friends

There are certain books that I turn to again and again while I’m writing. If you’re writing and publishing novels, too, maybe you’ll find them helpful. Click on any book for more info.

 

Deep Work by Cal Newport helped me get back on track this summer when my production was falling. I’d trapped myself in a cycle of fiddly business details and endless emails, and Deep Work (recommended to me by Julia Kent!) was really helpful. (Click on the book to read more.)

Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert is such so terrific. It’s so freeing in so many ways. It’s a really mythbusting book about our own insecurities, and it gives every author permission to feel insecure. And then to move past it.

Bird By Bird was the first book about writing that really ever made sense to me. Chapter 3 will live forever in my heart. The title is Shitty First Drafts. Until I read this book I didn’t realize that writing bad first drafts wasn’t merely inevitable. Rather, it’s an important part of the process. And whenever I’m struggling it’s usually because I’ve forgotten this rule, and need a reminder.

I’m not sure why this is called the Writer’s Thesaurus because, um, all thesauri are for writers. (Thesauri isn’t really the plural but go with it just this once.) It’s akin to marketing The Cook’s Whisk or the Tire-Changer’s Lug Wrench.

Anyway, this is a terrific thesaurus and I’d use it more often if my teenager wasn’t fond of stealing it.

The Visual Dictionary is something I bought at a used book sale for $2 and it was a great expenditure. It’s great for using real-life vocabulary when a scene calls for a character with specialized knowledge. Also when you’re stuck it’s just fun to read…

How to Co-Write a Novel. (Is that even possible?)

I originally wrote this post for a now-defunct blog in 2015. But people still ask me this question all the time, so I’m reprinting it here! —S.B.

The first co-written novel I ever remember reading was The Nanny Diaries by Emma Mclaughlin and Nicola Kraus. (And, hang on, it’s a New Adult novel, too! College girl at a crossroads? Crushing on the guy upstairs? Heck yes.)

That book was so clever and fabulous that I admired it immediately. And then I remember wondering about their collaboration. The funny voice seemed so consistent all the way through. And there were innovative things about the narrative that had to be one person’s idea. (Almost no character has a real name, except for the little boy. “Nanny” is the main character and the antagonist is “Mrs. X.”)

Did one of those women feel more ownership of the book? Did they secretly feud over that funny line in chapter three? And how did they celebrate when they hit the New York Times bestseller list?

The truth hurts.

In 2007 I co-wrote a cookbook with one of my best friends since middle school. That was easier to envision as a collaboration, and indeed it was smooth sailing. She wrote most of the pasta section. I did the slow cooker chapter. The cocktails? We tested them all together on one sloppy evening. We never argued.

At the time I thought, “this is easy because it isn’t my baby.” We’d sold the book to Random House almost on a whim, and I knew that writing cookbooks wouldn’t be my lifelong calling. Ergo, when my friend made changes I didn’t take it personally.

Fast forward a few years and Elle Kennedy asked me if I wanted to co-write a male/male hockey romance. We both wrote hockey series and admired each others’ books. It made sense as a collaboration.

My answer was “hell yes.” But I was more nervous this time. Could I let go enough to share a fictional narrative? What if Elle wrote a chapter and my gut argued, “wait. That’s not what was supposed to happen!”

But I shouldn’t have worried. Writing HIM was so much fun. We (mostly) plotted it out ahead of time, so that the major arcs were in place. (I can’t imagine co-writing without that step. But supposedly people do it.) Then we’d trade off approximately every 2000 words. And when I’d open that file to read what she’d done? It was like Christmas morning. There were the characters I had in my brain but they were doing fun things without my help! It was glorious.

When we were done, I was bereft. As I flipped back to another book I was supposed to be working on, it occurred to me that I was going to have to solve all the problems with it by myself. What kind of a bum deal is that?

Did we ever disagree? No and yes. Elle wrote a scene that was perfectly good. But I realized that the next bit would be even better if things happened a little differently. So I rewrote it in another file to try things out, and she very graciously said, “Awesome. Carry on.”

And there was a scene where our men have an argument and I rewrote that sucker like fifty times. I always do that with arguments in my own books, too. And she just laughed it off, leaving a note in the margin as we were finishing our revisions. “This is your favorite scene to revise, so I’ll leave you to it.”

Maybe it worked because Elle Kennedy is the most relaxed human on earth. Or maybe because our styles gelled. But I’d like to think that it also worked because I wrote more than ten novels before we wrote HIM. (Elle has written a multiple of that number.) So I’d done this enough times to know that getting emotional about this line or that scene is just not helping the book. 

The result is a book I’m very proud of, with one unexpected result. When I read it now, there are portions where I actually don’t remember who wrote them. Either I’m addled, or that’s proof that it really worked. 

2018 ADDENDUM

In the time since I wrote this post, I’ve had two more collaborators. It’s been my privilege to write with Sarah Mayberry and Tanya Eby, too! And what I’ve learned by now is that every time you co-write a book with someone, you learn a lot about your own process. For example, I thought I was a plotter until I wrote with Sarah Mayberry. She is a plot ninja.

And Tanya and I have to work a little harder to blend our voices than in my other collaborations. But the result is so, so worth it. Together we created a series that I could not have created alone. It’s magical!

Love,

Sarina

Fireworks cover reveal!

Did you see? I love it so much! Thank you Sarah Hansen for another beautiful design, and Sara Eirew for a gorgeous photo.

You can pre-order at: Amazon | iBooks | Kobo | Nook

Blog hop and freebie! (And a bonus scene!)

Greetings! 

I’ve teamed up with a few of my author friends to do something different this weekend. All five of us—Chelle Bliss, Kennedy Fox, Adriana Locke, and Rebecca Yarros and I—have posts on our websites. Each post has something different, possibly a giveaway, maybe something super cool you didn’t know about a book coming out. We’d love for you to check out all the posts (and I’ll even give you a directory of their websites at the bottom!).

A free gift for those who are new to me:

Like grumpy heroes? Hot farmers? Perky chefs? You can get the first book in the USA Today bestselling True North series right this second for free here Amazon | iBooks | B&N | Kobo | Google. 

And a gift for those of you who have already read the True North books:

Surprise! Here's a bonus epilogue for Speakeasy. Fresh off the presses!

That was fun, wasn’t it? ☺ Now hop on over to the next post and see what my friends have in store for you!

Adriana: https://www.adrianalocke.com/blog

Kennedy: http://kennedyfoxbooks.com/blog/

Rebecca: http://www.rebeccayarros.com/blog/

Chelle: https://chellebliss.com/hop/

 

You need this excerpt from Boy Toy!

“What are you guys in the mood for?” I ask, bringing up the Netflix icon on my screen.

“Hmmm…” Ash says. “I dunno. How about something sexy? Like, The Graduate!”

That’s a little weird. Usually Ash asks for some kind of action flick involving explosions or car chases or both.

“Nah,” Brynn says. “I’m much more in the mood for American Pie. You know, I think that’s the movie where the term MILF was invented. You know, a Mother I’d Like To Fuck.”

There’s a massive scoop of New York Style cheesecake hovering just inches from my mouth when everything clicks into place. “Dammit!” The fork clatters to my plate. “What did you guys see?”

They both collapse in hysterics. Seriously, they’re laughing so hard that Brynn might go into labor. I should’ve known when I entered the door and they were al oh, hiiiiiiii. And Brynn’s eyebrows were wagging. And Ash was all smirky. They must’ve seen Liam kissing me! They must’ve driven right past and I was so involved I didn’t even notice. 

“Just tell us if that runner boy is as good a kisser as I imagine him being.”

And I get a little bit jealous all of a sudden when Ash says that. Like my inner goddess growls mine. 

“Please say there’s more where that kiss came from!” Brynn this time. “Please tell me there is boinking. I can’t boink right now. It’s just too much effort, but I’d love to live vicariously through you.”

“No! There’s no...boinking.” I clear my throat, set the cheesecake down. “Or blowing. Or banging. Or anything. It was just a kiss.”

Ash shakes her head. “I know what a just-a-kiss looks like, and that was not. That’s was just-a-foreplay. That dude wants you so bad.”

“Liam,” I say, and I sort of sound all breathy and ridiculous.

“Liammm,” they echo, mimicking me in the same voice.

Fucking girlfriends.

“So…” I should probably just tell them. They’re my best friends and they’ve always been my support system. They’ll tell me the truth and be real with me, and consider all the options. They won’t jump to conclusions and I know I can trust them. 

So why am I procrastinating? Why don’t I just blurt it out? 

“Liam wants to have a no strings attached sexual relationship with me to cure me of my sex drought and because apparently it will fulfill some inner fantasy he’s had of me since he was fourteen.”

This is the part where my besties ponder the question with me. We’ll have an in-depth conversation discussing the pros and cons and the possible emotional complications, and…

Ash says, “Do it.”

Brynn says, “Yeah. Fuck him.”

Ah. That was fast. “But aren’t I too…”

“Short?” Brynn guesses. “Nah.”

“Uptight?” Ash supplies. “Didn’t look like it a half hour ago.”

“...Old,” I finish. “He makes me feel like a cougar.”

“You can’t be a cougar until at least forty,” Ash says. “It’s a rule. So you have five years left. But in five years he’ll be thirty-four, and the differential between your ages will be inside of twenty percent. So you will have aged out of cougardom.”

“You’ll be fully amortized,” Brynn adds.

We both give her weird looks. “Do you know what amortized means?” Ash asks.

“No, but it sounds like the Latin word for love,” she shrugs. “Let’s eat cheesecake and watch a kissing movie.”

And that is why the three of us have never successfully completed a serious conversation. We have, on the other hand, successfully completed many a cheesecake.

Get it at: Amazon | iBooks | Nook | Kobo | Google | Amazon US | Amazon UK | Amazon CA | Amazon AU

Guess who's writing another True North book!

Hard at work on my trusty ancient typewriter... Okay, not really.

I'm not ready to announce it, but I'm hard at work. And there are more than a couple of options. So what do you think? Who's up next?

Who do you think will get the next True North book?Benito RossiDylan ShipleyDamien RossiKieran ShipleyDaphne ShipleyUncle OttoGrandpa ShipleyOtherPlease Specify: Created with Poll Maker

Cover Reveal!

Cover design by Christine Coffey of Karnes Coffey.

I'm so excited to bring you BOY TOY in August! This one is just...sigh. Liam is a really fun hero. You're going to love him. It's pretty much guaranteed. I mean, anyone who can't love Liam probably dislikes pictures of puppies, too. 

You can get your copy at Amazon | iBooks | Nook | Kobo.

More about BOY TOY:

A brand new romantic comedy from your favorite snort-laughing duo!

Liam
The moment Sadie Matthews walks through the daycare center door, I feel my world tilt in her direction. Again. I fell for her when I was fourteen, and I’m still not over her. Problem: she still thinks of me as a teen she used to babysit. But I’ve learned a few things about pleasing a woman in the last fifteen years. I can’t wait to show her how good it could be. I need to move quickly before I lose her again. This is more than a game to me, but I still plan to win.

Sadie
I’ve just survived the worst year of my life. As a single mom of twin toddlers, I don’t have time for a man. I barely have time to finish a thought. Who knew that Liam McAllister would grow up to be so devastating? He’s everything my husband was not: tall, built, and willing to have a tea party with my girls. 

I can’t possibly get involved with him. He’s too young for me. Too handsome. But he’s so persuasive...

At You can get your copy at Amazon | iBooks | Nook | Kobo.