I’m super excited to have Renee Conoulty on the blog today. Renee is an Australian Air Force wife and mother of two. Her debut chick lit novel, Don’t Mean a Thing, is available through Kindred Ink Press. She has also published Catching Onix, a short story which is available for free here. https://www.instafreebie.com/free/OSTdp
When she’s not devouring books, reviewing and blogging on HeySaidRenee, or writing her own stories, Renee can be found swing dancing. Or possibly napping. She tweets about reading and reviewing @HeySaidRenee and about writing, military life and dancing @ReneeConoulty, but hasn’t created a handle for nap talk yet.
Tell us about your story behind the story, Renee!
Ever since I took up swing dancing many, many years ago, I’ve been looking for novels with swing dancing in them. The closest I’d come was finding a couple of swing dance scenes scattered amongst the 850 pages of a Stephen King tome.
When my husband joined the military, I looked for military stories I could relate to. I found plenty of alpha male hot romance stories, historical military books and novels dealing with PTSD but there was a lack of fun contemporary Australian military stories and very few women in the military.
When I found out our family was being posted to Darwin, I wanted to get a feel for the area we were moving to so looked for contemporary Darwin stories. I found plenty of outback stories and some historical but not much set in the city.
I couldn’t find the books I wanted to read so I decided to write one that combined all three ideas. I’d never contemplated writing a novel before I started Don’t Mean a Thing. Writing novels were something amazingly talented, creative people did, not ordinary people like me. I’d been living in Darwin for three years when it occurred to me that, maybe, I could write a book. I was an avid reader (I’d joined a reading challenge group in Goodreads when I first moved to Darwin and was treating reading like a competitive sport). My love of reading led to writing reviews and sharing them on a blog. My blogging led to meeting authors online where I discovered that, yes, they are amazingly talented and creative but authors are also ordinary people like me. I made lots of friends, like Alli, and became immersed in the world of books but still had no aspirations to write one. Where would I start? I didn’t know how to plot. And books had so many words – I struggled to write a blog post, how could I ever write a novel?
It was this blog post I read in the middle of 2015 that inspired me to give it a go.
Natasha Lester told me (she wrote that post specifically for me, I’m sure) that I didn’t need a plan and an outline, I just needed some time and one idea.
My husband was going away for a few weeks with the military, so I had time to fill after the kids went to bed. I even had three ideas, not just one. A girl in the military who moves to Darwin and takes up swing dancing to make friends. Scene by scene, I wrote a book.
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Website
http://heysaidrenee.blogspot.com.au
Blurb:
What if you finally took the lead, but life refused to follow?
Thirty-year-old introvert, Macie Harman, has finally found a career she is passionate about, and after months of training, she’s begun her new job in the Royal Australian Air Force. Leaving behind her family, friends, and the life she knew, Macie has travelled to the other side of the country where the only person she knows is Rachael, the extroverted girl she went through basic training with. Everywhere Macie goes, Rachael is there too.
While looking for a way to widen her circle of friends in her new town, Macie discovers a local swing dancing class. The jazz music captures her heart, and Matt, the sexy swing dancer, sweeps her off her feet. Matt has claimed the tropical Northern Territory as home and has no plans to leave. He loves his teaching career with its predictable routine and has a great bunch of friends. All he wants now is the right girl to make his house a home.
Military life is tougher than Macie expected, and not everyone can deal with the inevitable separations and last minute changes. Is this exciting but unpredictable life something Macie wants to fight for, or could she give it up and put down roots with Matt?
Universal purchase link – http://books2read.com/DMAT
Today I’m delighted to welcome Sarah Williams to my blog. Sarah spent her childhood chasing sheep, riding horses and picking Kiwi fruit on the family orchard in rural New Zealand. After a decade travelling, Sarah moved to tropical North Queensland to enjoy the heat and humidity and run around after Crocodiles.
In The Brothers of Brigadier Station we meet Lachie, Darcy and their mother Harriet. The second and third books in the series will be released in 2018. Everyone has a story to tell and I am excited to share it with my readers!
The Brothers of Brigadier Station is the first in the Brigadier Station series and can easily be read as a standalone. Each of Sarah’s stories are linked so you can find out what happens to the other brothers and your favourite characters in future books.
The Brothers of Brigadier Station ebook is available only on Kindle Unlimited until mid-August 2017.
I’m so very excited to let you know that Parisian Dreams, the prequel novella to my upcoming release, is now available to download as a free read to get you ready for the release of Beneath the Parisian Skies in July! You can download Parisian Dreams through your regular e-book trader, or you can go to the Harlequin Australia, Ebooks.com, Booktopia or Angus and Robertson websites and they will email you a copy. At this stage, only readers in Australia and New Zealand can access it, but for those of you elsewhere, I should have some good news for you very shortly!
Dairy farms – I’ve written a lot about sheep farms and even beef cattle farms, but TALK OF THE TOWN is my first rural romance set in dairy country. This is surprising because I have always loved dairy cows, ever since spending a few days on a friend’s dairy farm in the Isle of Gigha (Scotland) when I was twenty-four years old. That is a long time ago now so when I decided that my latest rural hero would own a dairy farm, I had to do a little more recent research. A friend of mine grew up on a dairy farm and still lives in dairy farming country. So she asked friends of hers if she could bring me round one morning (early one morning, like before the sun rose) to get an idea of exactly what being a dairy farmer involved. I got to see them bring in the cows, put them through their rotary milking machine, ask lots of questions and even meet their newest calves (which are simply adorable). I took lots of notes and lots of photos, which I looked back on when writing the dairy scenes of the book.
Final piece of the puzzle – I cannot tell you exactly what this is because… spoilers (you’ll have to read the book to find out what I’m talking about), but the heroine of TALK OF THE TOWN is actually loosely based on a friend of mine who once told me about her dark past and how she’d left it behind. A few years back when I was running (during my brief dalliance with jogging) past her house early one morning, a line appeared in my head: “She had enough skeletons in her closet, she could deal with a few ghosts!” I knew then and there that this line and the “she” it would refer to needed to go in a book and that it was finally time to write my ghost town where this “she” person could have escaped to.
Alli Sinclair 