Guest Blog: Carolyn Brown and Giveaway

Author Carolyn Brown is here for a guest post today! Let's all give a warm welcome to an awesome author!  She wrote a guest post to share with all of you today and Sourcebooks was kind enough to offer a giveaway! 

Carolyn Brown Guest Blog, author of Getting Lucky

Good morning. It’s a pure pleasure to be here this morning at your website to talk about Getting Lucky and my favorite part about writing romance.

Getting Lucky is the third and final book in the Lucky Series. Lucky in Love came out last September and One Lucky Cowboy in November. Writing all three of them was so much fun that I hated to see the series come to an end.

My favorite part of any book is seeing the characters develop from the beginning to the end. They become more and more real from the first page to the last and when writing a series they get to come back for cameo appearances in the next editions so their characteristics develop even further. That’s the reason I read romance as well as write it. From page one I don’t even know those people. At the end of a good romance, they are my neighbors and we’ve had coffee together.

When they first dance through my mind they are little more than strangers. By the time I finish a book they are as real as the folks who own a ranch out east of town or the ladies down at the grocery store. They have their own quirks and personalities and I know them well enough to know exactly how they’ll react when I pitch a hurdle in their way as they try to get to the happy-ever-after part!

I knew Milli and Beau’s story (Lucky in Love) and how they had met two years before at a wedding in Louisiana but I didn’t know them personally. After the first couple of pages they made my office their home and sat on the futon behind me most of the time. Sometimes Milli actually crawled up on my shoulder and yelled in my ear when I wasn’t telling her story just right. When I finished their book I knew them as well as my own children and Katy Scarlett as well as my granddaughter that age.

Slade and Jane had quite a tale to tell in One Lucky Cowboy but again I didn’t know them very well. I’d met Slade at a barn dance at Beau’s place a couple of times but I’m not sure I even mentioned him by name. Then Jane was on the run from an assassin and wound up at Slade’s ranch. By the time the three of us had run all over Florida, Louisiana, Texas and parts of Oklahoma, we were pretty dang good friends. They’d developed from acquaintances to a couple that I’d take home to meet my momma but I don’t think I’d tell her about that incident in the tattoo parlor down in Florida.

Julie Donavan snuck up on my blind side one night. Griffin Luckadeau had this sweet little girl, Lizzy, that we met in One Lucky Cowboy that stole my heart. So I knew I wanted him to tell me more about his past and how that child inherited his white streak. But then before I could actually sit down and listen to his tale, there was Julie and her daughter, Annie, who had the same white streak, needing to get out of Jefferson where the gossip might hurt Annie’s feelings. Somehow both stories got all tangled together and nagged at me until I decided to get to know them all a lot better. So they brought Annie and Lizzy into my imagination and we began to write Getting Lucky!

All of them brought along their relatives and friends and for the better part of a year we’ve had the most amazing barn dances, cat fights, family parties and even poker games. Shhhhh! Don’t tell anyone that or those fellows in the white jackets will come and force me into group therapy. I don’t think they’d understand that I can’t do that without bringing my friends from the Lucky series with me! And there’s just not room on one of those leather couches for all of us.

Seriously, if I had to name one thing that I like best about writing romance it truly would be the character development, seeing them grow from people I barely know to my very good friends.

So what do you like best about romance? Besides those wonderfully sexy covers, that is!

GETTING LUCKY BY CAROLYN BROWN—IN STORES JANUARY 2010

Single mom Julie Donavan is looking for a place to start over. What she finds after buying a small house on five acres is nothing short of a nightmare.

Single dad "Lucky Griffin" Luckadeau has been crossing horns with his elderly neighbor for years. But when his daughter, Annie, decides she wants the new little girl who lives on the feuding property to be her friend, or better yet her sister, the sparks fly.

These two stubborn hotheads, who irritate each other beyond endurance, refuse to admit that it's fate that brought them together. And running from the inevitable is only going to bring a double dose of misery…

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Carolyn Brown, an award-winning author who has published 36 romance novels for the library market, credits her eclectic family for her humor and writing ideas. She was born in Texas but grew up in southern Oklahoma where she and her husband, Charles, a retired English teacher, now make their home in the town of Davis, Oklahoma. They have three grown children and enough grandchildren to keep them young. For more information, please visit http://www.carolynlbrown.com/

 GIVEAWAY:

Thanks to Sourcebooks!  Here is what you could win:

1 set of Carolyn’s trilogy: Lucky in Love, One Lucky Cowboy and Getting Lucky. 

How to enter:

Leave a comment on this post!

Be a follower. 

You must live in the USA or Canada.  No P.O. Boxes.

Contest will end on Saturday, Jan. 30th. Winner will be announced on Sunday. Good Luck!

Thank you so much Carolyn for joining us today! I look forward to reading your books as you are a new to me author! I wish you the great success you deserve with your books that are out now and in the future!