Say it with Flowers!

By: Marcia King-Gamble

www.lovemarcia.com

Aloha!

This month in honor of my new release, Islands Apart, we are celebrating all things Hawaiian. My novella,  Islands Apart is set in beautiful Honolulu, where I once lived eons ago.

http://amzn.com/B013U5ADOY

As an island girl I feel highly qualified to say that Hawaii has some of the most beautiful flora in the world. You're probably  most familiar with  Plumeria,  known as the lei flower.  Plumeria and Franchipani are actually the same flower and used in making traditional leis.  In addition to being pretty,  they have the most awesome smell. They also come in an assortment of colors like white, yellow, pink and red. Here's a pic of one of the leis sent to a winner at my recent launch party. 

And here’s our own blog queen, Judith Ashley  after getting leied. Judith won this lei at The Generista’s fourth anniversary Facebook party. Doesn't she look stunning?

Here's Franchipani or Plumeria from another angle.  This is the Franchipani tree growing poolside. While lovely to look at, and aromatic as they come, there are challenges. I've got to fish these flowers out of my pool each day and that's no fun!

Another lovely Hawaiian flower, and a  favorite, is the orchid. I’ll take orchids over roses any day. My collection is growing and when the bloom is off, I grow them outdoors. My secret - I do absolutely nothing to them except to twine them around the trunks of palm trees , amazingly they blossom.

Here’s a pic of one of the orchids growing in my backyard.

There’s a scene in Islands Apart where my hero, Caden comes to take my  heroine, Livvy to dinner and an orchid plays a part in the budding romance. Below you can find an excerpt from the scene.

“You’re throwing me to the wolves,” Livvy wailed, even as Mal pushed her out the door.

Somehow she managed to make it to the lobby without breaking her ankle.

 Caden waited, arms behind his back, in front of one of the overstuffed couches, looking so handsome that. Livvy’s breath hitched in her throat. He was wearing a jacket with a white polo shirt underneath and pressed jeans. He tucked an orchid behind her ear, making her feel like Diana Ross in Mahogany, the old movie about Billie Holiday; except Billie wore gardenias. 

 Livvy was  swept into Caden’s arms and kissed soundly on the mouth.

“Lady, you take my breath away. I can’t wait to show you off,” he said, whisking her toward the valet.

Another exotic flower is the hibiscus. In Hawaii they grow in abundance and are used even as hedges. The colors are unusual and no luau would ever be complete without the requisite hula girl with the flower tucked behind her ear. Isn't this sweet little girl just the cutest?

Of course, no woman’s life is ever complete until she receives an exotic Hawaiian bouquet.  These flowers last forever, and as my sexy hero, Caden knows,  what better way to apologize  to the one you love,  than to say it with flowers. 

Another excerpt from Islands Apart:

“Someone likes you. They’re beautiful,” the pretty Polynesian woman at the concierge desk said, when Livvy went off to claim her delivery.  The attendant struggled under the burden of an oversized arrangement consisted of trailing orchids, birds of paradise and anthuriums. “I can have the flowers sent up.”

Please let it not be from Thorne.   

With some trepidation, Livvy opened the accompanying card and read the message. Her cheeks heated up and her heart jumped.

Livvy,

I owe you and  Bryan a huge apology. Will you have dinner with me tonight?

I miss you,

Caden

 I hope this teaser makes you download a copy of Islands Apart. Be sure to enjoy the beautiful scenery and smell the flowers, and hopefully the storyline will keep you hooked.

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http://bit.ly/1LnrFVx

 Mahalo! 

Here's a Blue Hawaii to keep you reading!

Romantically Yours!

Marcia

Playing for Keeps by Liz Matis

by Liz Matis 
The Tao of Liz, at  http://www.taoofliz.blogspot.com

My idea for Playing For Keeps stems from my teens when despite Title IX and a 1978 lawsuit ruling in favor of a woman sportswriter who was banned from going into the locker room at the World Series, women were subject to discriminatory practices.

My Uncle Fred was a baseball writer in the sixties and seventies and though he had no problem with
women sportswriters he believed they didn’t belong in the men’s locker rooms. And not because he thought they would ogle the men but because at the end of the day women were ladies and should not be subjected to the crass locker room culture. Now, he came from at different time—hell, he wore Clark Kent type glasses, wore a suit and sported a hat. Though he didn’t think women should be allowed in the locker room I never considered him sexist.

For example, at my grandmother’s house on Thanksgiving Day I was spared from cleanup duty when my Uncle Fred called me into the living room with the other men folk to watch football. I was only nine years old and I still remember it clearly. It left an indelible mark on my female self that women did not have to be relegated to the kitchen. In fact when I got married I had a holiday rule with my husband that when it’s my family’s house I help with the cleanup and when it’s his family’s house—he cleans up.

Anyway, when I decided to write a romance I wanted to write about a heroine I wished I had the guts to be and Samantha Jameson was born. I gave her a hunky football player to challenge her every step of the way.  ~ Liz Matis

PLAYING FOR KEEPS 

BOOK TRAILER

http://youtu.be/HmxQOtF3a-w

 BLURB:   Journalist Samantha Jameson always wanted to be one of the boys, but Ryan Terell won’t let her join the club.

Fresh from the battlegrounds of Iraq, reporting on a bunch of overgrown boys playing pro football is just the change of scenery she needs. If trying to be taken seriously in the world of sports writing wasn’t hard enough, Ryan, her college crush, is only making it harder. As a tight-end for the team she’s covering, he is strictly off limits.

Ryan Terell is a playmaker on and off the field, but when Samantha uncovers his moves, he throws out the playbook. Just as he claims his sweetest victory, Samantha’s investigation into a steroid scandal involving his team forces him to call a time-out to their off the record trysts. But then a life threatening injury on the field will force them both to decide just how far they’ll go to win the game.

Overheard on... Romancing the Genres

“She cleared the bleachers and saw him make his way around the side of the stadium where he spotted a pair of brothers playing catch with their young dad. The camera and Max were indistinguishable.”

My lovely writer friend, Kathy Dunnehoff has managed to bring us older women back to school in her book, BACK TO U.  By doing this, she is able to draw from, and recreate the nostalgia of college days- including the fun and craziness of college sports games. In this scene the hero and protagonist are competing to see who can take a better photo of the game. Gwen, the protagonist, can’t imagine Max taking anything but a gritty shot and he is trying to prove her wrong.

Although BACK TO U isn’t strictly a sports romance, it uses the role of sports as a third character in the book. Through the football players Gwen befriends and her growing appreciation for the sport, we watch her character change and develop. At the same time, Ms. Dunnehoff is able to use the tension (see how I got that in there) that derives from our idealized version of sports (the two kids playing catch with their dad) versus the reality (cracking skulls, cheering- sometimes drunk- crowds, winning at all costs). Through this tension we get to see the boy that Max was vs the man that he has become, just as we observe a transition occurring within Gwen.

April is Romancing the Genres sports romance month. We will have some great sports authors visit to show us what it takes to use the sports theme in romance. I hope, as part of this, they will explore how sports help them develop character and story tension.

Meanwhile… here are some nostalgic sports pictures. If you are up for the challenge, try to list the sweet, idealized themes in the picture, and then compare it to the reality of what was probably happening. As always, I love to hear your thoughts, so be sure to leave a comment with what you encountered while completing this exercise.

Cheers - Deanne
www.deannewilsted.com
@dwilsted

A Different Kind of Fantasy Football - The Sports Hero Genre

My love affair with football goes back many years to watching high school football. I grew up in a small North Central Washington town where football was the only thing to do on a Friday night in the fall. After high school, I attended college at Washington State University, and I never missed a home football game. By the time I graduated from college, football was in my blood. Back in the old Kingdome days, I held season tickets to the Seahawks for several years.Never a fair weather fan, I stuck with my Cougars and Seahawks through the good and bad times, always holding out hope for the best. My interest in football players and what makes them tick led me to dream up stories about them. Over the years, I toyed with writing romance novels with football heroes. 

In 2004 I started writing seriously for publication. My first completed manuscript was a football hero romance novel. After joining a couple of local RWA chapters, it wasn’t long before I started hearing the “rules” of romance writing. Right up there at the top was the “no sports heroes” rule. I was shocked and more than surprised. It never dawned on me that jocks would be a “hard sell” to New York publishers. After all, who doesn’t love a hunky football player? Well, according to mass-market-paperback publishers, lots of people.

Certain my book would be the exception, I submitted to several publishers. Every one of them gave me the same answer: Thanks, but no thanks. Sports heroes don’t sell. 

With extreme sadness, I put my book away and focused my writing in other directions. My first published book was released in 2008. Since then I’ve published three more books as Jami Davenport and six super-erotic novels under another pen name. In the meantime, my own insatiable interest in reading books with sports romance heroes was filled occasionally by the few bestselling authors who chose to write a sports romance novel, but they were few and far between.

Reading a book with a football hero is my own brand of fantasy football. My ideal sports hero is arrogant, fit, and driven, a man’s man who commands respect from other alpha males. He knows what he wants, and he goes after it with single-minded determination. His inborn competitiveness defines him. At the same time, he’s a good guy with a soft spot for kids and animals, even if he appears to be a very bad boy on the surface. Deep down he’s vulnerable, and only the heroine can touch his vulnerability and chip away at his brash armor. What’s not to love about a man like that even if you don’t care for the sport that he plays for a living?

Luckily for readers like me, digital presses have opened up niche markets in the past few years. The demand for books to fill those niches is growing in leaps and bounds. Digital publishing is a big boon for those of us who choose to write books out of the mainstream, books which supposedly don’t have mass-market appeal. 

A few years ago, I dusted off my football hero romance, rewrote it from scratch only keeping the basic idea and the characters, and submitted it to several New York publishers, just to test the market and see if it had changed. It hadn’t. The only difference this time was that my rejections were personalized rejections along the lines of: Love the story, but sports hero romances don’t sell. None of these responses surprised me, nor was I very disappointed. I made a few changes based on some suggestions I’d received and submitted to a few reputable digital presses. Within a week, I had three offers for publication. It seems digital presses don’t have an issue with football hero romances. In fact, digital publishing has opened up a whole new contemporary romance genre centered around sports heroes. Go to Amazon or Barnes and Noble and search for romance novels with sports heroes. The list is so long that even I haven’t been able to keep up with all of them. I’m also thrilled to report that the sales rankings on these books appear to be quite good.

After a slow start, my own sports romance novel is now out-selling the rest of my books, even my more erotic romances that are usually my best-sellers. In fact, I’m so happy with the reception I’ve received for Fourth and Goal that I’m planning to write several more sports-themed romances in the future. The sequel is already completed and waiting for publication.

The moral of my story is write what you love, not what’s currently selling, because the market changes frequently, and you won’t be able to keep up with it. Besides, I firmly believe readers can tell if an author is passionate about their story or if an author is merely following the trends. The digital market has opened up multiple opportunities for writers in the smaller niche markets. If you’re a reader, you have to be thrilled at the direction publishing is taking, as your choices are endless. You don’t have to settle for reading only those books the big publishers deem marketable when you want a different type of story.

If, like me, you love a good sports hero romance, you should be in heaven as this niche genre is expanding rapidly with excellent reading choices only a click away. The books are as well-written as any mass-market romance. So read on and get your sports hero fix, I know I will.

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Fourth and Goal By Jami Davenport

Book 1 in my Seattle Lumberjacks Football Series

In a game played on and off the field, only one of them will emerge the winner.

Armed with an uncanny ability for evaluating football talent, a dogged determination to succeed in a man’s world, and an empty bank account, Rachel McCormick agrees to help struggling wide receiver Derek Ramsey get his game back. Rachel believes Derek, her former best friend and lover, knows the truth behind a points-shaving scandal which ruined her father. She vows to expose the secret even if it destroys Derek in the process.

When Derek’s coach suggests sex as an excellent tension reliever the night before a game, Rachel takes one for the team. The next day, Derek has the best performance of his not-so lustrous pro football career. As Derek and Rachel rack up nights in bed and other places, the team racks up wins on the field. Rachel is torn between her loyalty to her father and her growing affection for Derek. Now it’s fourth and goal, one second left on the clock. Their hearts are on the line. Do they trust each other enough to go for the long bomb or do they get dropped for a loss?

Available from Loose Id

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Jami Davenport has been writing since she was old enough to know the alphabet. An advocate of happy endings, Jami writes sexy romantic comedy, sports hero romances, and equestrian fiction. Jami lives on a small farm near Puget Sound with her husband, a former Green Beret turned plumber, a Newfoundland cross with a tennis ball fetish, a prince disguised as an orange tabby cat, and an opinionated Hanoverian mare. She works in IT for her day job and is a former high school business teacher. She is the author of four contemporary romances under the Jami pen name and five super hot romances under a different pen name.

Website: http://www.jamidavenport.com

Facebook:http://www.facebook.com/jamidavenport

Twitter:http://www.twitter.com/jamidavenport