First, announcements! I’m a guest today at The Romance Dish, where I’m blogging about the importance of books and reading, in life and romance. Please come share your thoughts. My post includes an exclusive excerpt from One Dance with a Duke!
Also, tomorrow I’ll be attending my local RWA chapter meeting, and if you’re anywhere in the area, I’d invite you to come too! Our all-day guest will be Sue Grimshaw of Borders Group, Inc., who buys all the Romance books for Borders stores. And I will be one of the Ask-an-Author participants and signing books over the lunch break. More information here.
Moving right along…
The title of my post refers to my new favorite TV show, as of last night. If you follow this blog, or my Facebook or Twitter feeds, you’ve probably gathered that I’m a fan of reality competition shows like Top Chef and Project Runway. Sure, I love them for all the typical reality TV reasons: big personalities, big drama, only one can win, etc. But I love these particular shows because I’m fascinated by the creative process. Whether they’re designing a dress or creating an entree, the participants are artists in their chosen media (fabric, food).
So imagine my delight that Bravo has a new show featuring…artists! It’s called Work of Art, and it’s a PR/TC-style show for visual artists. Here’s the promo (embedded from Bravo’s site, so apologies if there’s a commercial on the reel).
Artists just fascinate me. Sophia, the heroine of Surrender of a Siren, was an artist, and I loved getting into her head and thinking of all the different ways her artistic bent would affect her goals, her dreams, her daily activities, and her observations of the world around her. I know I’m going to enjoy every episode of this show — for the over-the-top personalities and drama, yes. But also for the sheer weekly delight of watching creators create.
Are there any jobs or vocations you find particularly fascinating, to the point where you’ll watch them endlessly on reality TV? Got a thing for those real-life medical dramas? Cold case files? Bounty hunter shows?
I can’t believe that Twice Tempted by a Rogue will be in bookstores just two weeks from today! I’ve added to the excerpt available on the site, so it’s now Chapter One in its entirety. Hope you enjoy getting to know a bit more about Rhys, Meredith, and the quirky little corner of Dartmoor they inhabit.
And thank you so much to all of you who’ve read One Dance with a Duke and sent me lovely emails, tweets, Facebook messages, and the like. Hearing from a satisfied reader just makes my day. You would not believe how wide I grin.
How have I not blogged about this yet? I thought I had – but I guess the announcement came out on release day, and the blog was full of recipes.
Anyway, I am completely thrilled to announce that One Dance with a Duke is an official selection of this summer’s hottest book club. SB Sarah of the Smart Bitches, Trashy Books blog and All Romance Ebooks are teaming up to bring you Sarah’s Sizzling Summer Book Club. This will be going on all summer long, but One Dance is Sarah’s very first selection – squee! (Look how beautiful my cover looks in the banner!) This means that if you want to buy the e-book, for a limited time, you can get it from ARe with a 50% rebate. Just click the banner above for more info.
Toward the end of June, Sarah will host an online discussion of the book (specific date and time still TBA, I think). So if you’ve read the book or been planning to read the book, and would like to discuss it with a bunch of savvy romance readers from all over the world, here is the perfect chance! (You needn’t buy the book from ARe to participate in the book club.) I will give you more detailed information about the discussion when I have it.
And because it’s Friday, courtesy of Smart Bitches, I bring you this hilarious video of library school students and faculty channeling their inner Gaga:
The good folks at Random House have booked me on a blog tour this summer, to travel around the internet and talk about my new trilogy! The wonderful Lisa at TLC Book Tours has industriously worked to set up a schedule, and the tour started yesterday. I will be doing guest posts in some cases, and other times the bloggers will just be posting reviews of the books. However, in almost every case there will be a giveaway!
Yesterday, my guest post went up at The Book Binge, where commenters have a chance to win a copy of One Dance with a Duke. In the post (and comments), I discuss the origins of The Stud Club, both in terms of historical context and humorous allusions. There is still plenty of time to comment and enter the giveaway.
Second, thank you so much to all who participated in the #recitweet contest! It was a fun way to spend release day, and so helpful to get so many easy, yummy recipes. I have all sorts of idea for feeding my family this summer, and I’ll let you know how it goes in practice.
$10 gift certificates go to the following:
From Twitter:
Cories
Dahlia Gordon
Noelle Pierce
From the blog: Linnea
Tien “Christine”
I will try to reach you all through email or Twitter, to find out which online bookstore you’d like your gift certificate from.
During the contest, we had over 200 #recitweet posts to twitter and almost 50 posts here on the blog! Because math is not my strong point, I’m going to round that total up to 400 and make a $100 donation to Feeding America. We will see if we can get that donation upped over the course of the summer with a different contest – I do have two more release days coming up.
It’s finally here! Release day for One Dance with a Duke, the first installment in an all-new trilogy. (And if you haven’t watched the Stud Club Trilogy video yet, you really should!) To celebrate the book’s release, I’m hosting a very special giveaway. Details here.
Woohoo! Today’s the big day! The release of One Dance with a Duke, the first installment in an all-new trilogy. I’m so proud of this book, and of course, I want to have a contest to celebrate!
Usually, I just invite you all to comment to win books. That’s always fun, but I thought I’d do something different today. I’m going to ask you to help feed my family. And in the process, feed some other families.
Bear with me for a moment. There’s a method to this madness, promise.
The heroine of One Dance with a Duke, Amelia, is a true hostess and expert at menu planning. She has a little book of recipes and menus that she keeps, and she takes pride in putting together the perfect meal. Well, this part of her characterization was clearly wish fulfillment on my part. Meal-planning is not my forte–especially not with two picky darelings in the house and three books releasing back-to-back this summer. When dinnertime rolls around, I wish I had Amelia’s little book of recipes and menus. I also wish I had her servants to prepare them.
Since I don’t have those things, I figured…hey, the romance world is full of resourceful individuals. I am here to ask you to give me your family-friendly, time-saving dinner ideas. BUT. They must be easy and simple. So easy and simple that they will fit in one “tweet” (If you don’t use Twitter, this means that typed out they must be 140 characters or less, including spaces).
Here’s an example:
Lazy soup: 64oz can V8, stew beef, cubed veggies, thyme. Put all in slowcooker. Neglect. #recitweet
See, that’s barely 100 characters! Still so many to spare.
If you’re already on Twitter, you can enter by tweeting your recipe with the hashtag #recitweet. If you’re not on Twitter, you can post it here in the comments, and I’ll tweet it for you. Either method enters you to win. If you click here, you can follow all the #recitweet posts, even if you don’t have a Twitter account.
What can you win? Five random winners will receive $10 gift certificates to the online bookstore of their choice (Amazon, BN.com, Borders, MBAM, etc). There are so many great books releasing this week, I can’t even try to match them up with individual winners. This way, the choice is yours. (And if you’d prefer to have my book, I will gladly sign a copy and send it to you!)
In addition, for every tweet with the hashtag #recitweet that shows up on Twitter between now and midnight Pacific tomorrow (Wednesday), I’ll donate $0.25 to Feeding America, up to $250 total. (If you’re doing the math, that’s one thousand tweets to reach $250. We can totally do that, right? If you’re in the mood for more math, every dollar donated to Feeding America helps them get 9 pounds of food to hungry people, so that’s…. more than a ton of food.)
So if this works, I’ll get some new ideas for feeding my family, you may get some new ideas for feeding your family, and we’ll all get some food to people who need it. And hopefully, it will be fun! So please spread the word and get to tweeting your simplest recipes — creativity and humor are welcome and encouraged! I can’t wait to see what you all come up with.
And I hope this all makes sense, but feel free to ask questions if not.
I can’t believe it! Release day for One Dance with a Duke is finally almost here. To celebrate, I’m working on a fun contest and giveaway for tomorrow. In the meantime, I’ve at long last posted excerpts for Twice Tempted by a Rogue and Three Nights with a Scoundrel, in case you want to sneak peeks at books two and three in the series.
In the meantime…The lovely folks at RT Book Reviews magazine asked me to contribute a “Pros on Prose” article about historicals, for their June issue. I was glad to write it, and it is indeed in the issue that’s on newsstands now. As an extra for their website, they asked me to compile a list of my favorite starting places for Regency-era research.
If you click here, you can see the list I gave them and get links to the sites. One of the sites, The Regency Encyclopedia, is only available with a password–but the site’s generous owners created a login just for RT readers. I cannot overstate what a useful, thorough site this is, so if you have any interest in the Regency Era or in writing historical romance, I highly recommend you click over to RT’s site and make use of that login!
Edited to say: Obviously, these few sites are just a smattering of the wonderful resources available. If you have favorites of your own, please list them in the comments!
Well, this is a banner day here at TessaDare.com. Three blog posts in one day. Whew!
My publisher, Random House (Ballantine being a division of), has done something soooo cool – they’ve posted a 60-page excerpt of ONE DANCE WITH A DUKE on Scribd.com. And those 60 pages are all prettily formatted and look just like real book pages, too.
So if you’ve read Chapter One here at my site and want to go read some more…just click here! (You can even find links to share the excerpt on Twitter or Facebook, or embed it on your own blog or site. Can you tell I am impressed by this? )
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