A guest post by author Barbara Barrett
I’ve got another guest posting on my blog today, yay! Welcome Barbara Barrett, an awesome author who’s got a great new release out. Check out her guest post below, and then check out her books 
Thanks for stopping by and showing Barbara some love!
Houston, We’ve Got a Problem
“Houston, we’ve got a problem.” Thank you, “Apollo 13” for that quote. It works well as an opening line for this article. I like to use locations in my writing that have a certain sentimental attachment for me. In this case, Houston is the home of my uncle, two aunts, five cousins and their respective families and my stepsister. They were a great support to my mother when she lived there briefly a few years back. It is also the home of a former critique partner.
I have other fond memories of Houston as well. Years ago, when I was first married and my husband was in Advanced Training with the U.S. Army, we met in Houston when he had a weekend’s leave. At the time, I was a head resident in a women’s dormitory on the Drake University campus. My residents took up a collection to buy my airline ticket. Although I suppose I could have suspected their motives for getting me out of their hair for a few days, instead, I took the high road and very much appreciated their gesture, since I hadn’t seen him in a few months.
Admittedly, we spent a lot of that weekend in our motel room, but we also rented a car and did a little sightseeing as well. I remember driving near the NASA installation and down the Gulf Coast to Galveston. It even snowed while we were there, a bit of an oddity for the area. Their heating systems aren’t necessarily prepared for cold weather. At least our motel’s wasn’t.
Although my new book, Driven to Matrimony, takes place on a small vacation island off the South Carolina coast, the hero and heroine come from different parts of the country. Dina lives in Des Moines, Iowa, having deliberately selected a geographic area far away, physically and lifestyle-wise from her mother’s Hollywood haunts. I wanted Ben to hail from a totally different place than the Southern coast, the West Coast or the Midwest, so it had to be either the Northeast, the Northwest, or the Southwest. Houston got the nod.
Probably a more appropriate quote for Ben, a software developer and owner of a small information technology company, would be, “I’ve got a problem IN Houston.” His business is in trouble, because his competitors want the new product he’s developed, and since he won’t sell it to them, they work behind the scenes to make staying in business difficult. They lure away his only employees, undersell him with his customers and pull strings to subject him to a government audit. All that’s on his mind when he arrives in South Carolina to deal with an even more immediate problem, his twenty-year-old son’s engagement to a fifty-something movie star.
Houston has to take a back seat the next few days, as he and Dina attempt to stall off the impending nuptials of her mother and his son. But getting back home is never far from his mind, until he realizes he’s found his soul mate, his second chance at love, in Dina. Only then does he consider relocating, so the two of them can be together.
Will it be Houston, Des Moines or somewhere else? Check out the book to learn what they decide.
Bio
Barbara Barrett spent her professional career as a human resources analyst for Iowa state government, and that training has stayed with her in her writing of contemporary romance fiction. Now retired, Barbara spends her winters basking in the Florida sunshine and returns to her home state of Iowa in the summer to “stay cool.” Her first two books, The Sleepover Clause, Crimson Romance, and And He Cooks Too, The Wild Rose Press, were published in the past year. A third, Driven to Matrimony, TWRP, is available on Amazon for Kindle and will be released worldwide on January 15, 2014.
Contact Information
Website and blog: http://www.barbarabarrettbooks.com
Email: barbarabarrett747@gmail.com
Facebook: http://on.fb.me/11jvO3Q
Twitter: http://bit.ly/186AfCE
Amazon Author Central page: http://amzn.to/GYGkHr
Buy links
Driven to Matrimony
The Sleepover Clause
And He Cooks Too
Thanks for guesting, Barbara! So excited to check out the new release!
Smooches, Niecey
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