Winner of the Louisa Edwards giveaway!

Thanks to everyone who commented on my interview with Louisa Edwards! The lucky winner of Too Hot to Touch is…Joyce Zahariades!

You also win a copy of Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.

Joyce, email me your mailing address and phone number (which Amazon needs) at romancingkatrina [at] gmail [dot] com (and, just to warn you, I’m traveling to northern Kenya tomorrow so don’t worry if it takes me a few days to respond to your email).

For those of you who didn’t win, make sure you leave a comment on my interview with Rose Lerner. Her Regency romances are awesome!

Interview with Louisa Edwards – and giveaway!

Louisa Edwards is one of my all-time favorite  contemporary romance novelists. Her debut, Can’t Stand the Heat, was released just two years ago, but her sexy chefs and sassy heroines immediately catapulted her to the top of my auto-buy list.

Louisa joins me today as part of my Hearts and Minds giveaway – where you can win books that appeal to your heart and mind. She’s giving away a signed copy of her latest release, Too Hot to Touch, which has the most YOWZA! cover I’ve seen in a long time! She’s also giving away a set of romance trading cards featuring the Rising Star Chef characters.

Giveaway details are below the interview!

1. Welcome, Louisa! First off, what draws you to contemporary romance?

I love the immediacy and relatability of working in the real world, and I’ve found that my voice as a writer works best with modern language and dialogue. And I enjoy worldbuilding when I can use the building blocks of a world that already exists, like the world of professional restaurant kitchens—if I had to figure out my own rules of magic and the paranormal, it would be a disaster!

2. If you had to come up with a recipe for a successful contemporary romance, what would it be (and yes, I’m totally asking for selfish reasons, since I write contemporaries)?

My husband is a doctor – and I’m throwing a blog party to celebrate!

My husband finished his PhD! And he passed without having to make any corrections!

I’m clearly married to a genius, and that puts me in a celebratory mood. I’ve asked several friends to stop by over the coming month and help me celebrate by giving away books.

After four looong years of hard work and hours (hours HOURS) at the British Library, my husband can finally put Dr in front of his name.

Four years might not seem that long, but think about what the world was like in 2007:

• Twitter (aka my best friend in the whole wide world) was only a year old.
• The first Kindle was released on November 19, 2007 (yes – everyone read paper books).
• There was still a chance Dennis Kunisich could be president (okay, admittedly it was a small chance).

Details: the Hearts and Minds giveaway

This party will appeal to your hearts and your minds.

Every week in August, I’ll have an interview with a brilliant romance novelist who debuted in the last four years. We’ll be giving away some of their books, and I’ll also be giving winners one of the novels my husband wrote about in his PhD – some of the best American literary fiction of the 1980s (yes, there was good litfic in the 80s. Promise.)

You don’t want to miss interviews with these amazing authors:

Ashley March

Louisa Edwards

Kaki Warner

Beverley Kendall

Rose Lerner

So make sure you subscribe to my blog, follow me on Twitter, or like me on Facebook.

And thanks for helping me celebrate! I’ll see you back here on Monday, August 1st!

Why community is key to contemporary romance – and giveaway!

“In contemporaries, community is key,” Selina McLemore, Senior Editor at Grand Central Publishing, told me at the Romance Writers of America national conference last week.

It makes sense, right? Those of us who love contemporary romance fall for books set in a particular town or city that feels as fleshed out as the hero and heroine. A place we’d love to visit, move to, or just immerse ourselves in for a few hours.

But community shouldn’t be confused with setting. It’s more than that.

It’s characters—oddballs who make a town unique and help the hero and heroine when they need it most; fast-talking city folks who are so savvy they make a reader jealous; and families who can overwhelm the most patient person but pull together when it’s most needed. It’s colleagues who challenge and sharpen you, while also making you howl with laughter, like in Louisa Edwards’s Recipe for Love series.

But community shouldn’t be confused with character development. It’s more than that.