Giveaway and Guest Post: Love and Shenanigans by Zara Keane

June 19, 2014, Dani, Uncategorized, , 11

Vows in Vegas…

Three days before leaving Ireland on the adventure of a lifetime, Fiona Byrne returns to her small Irish hometown to attend the family wedding from hell. When she discovers the drunken vows she exchanged with the groom during a wild Las Vegas trip eight years previously mean they’re legally married, her future plans ricochet out of control. Can she untangle herself from the man who broke her heart so long ago? Does she even want to?

…True Love in Ballybeg.

Gavin Maguire’s life is low on drama, high on stability, and free of pets. But Gavin hadn’t reckoned on Fiona blasting back into his life and crashing his wedding. In the space of twenty-four hours, he loses a fiancée and a job, and gains a wife and a labradoodle. Can he salvage his bland-but-stable life? More importantly, can he resist losing his heart to Fiona all over again?

Link to Author Site: http://zarakeane.com

Link to Excerpt: http://zarakeane.com/?page_id=83

Amazon.com: http://amzn.to/1vt4QW5

Barnes & Noble: http://bit.ly/1h4i4PP

Apple: http://bit.ly/1mNF5Mr

Kobo: http://bit.ly/1kcgBeJ

GUEST POST

I wrote my first romance when I was 15 years old. It was a collaborative effort with my friend, Karen, a fellow closet Harlequin/Mills & Boon reader. Our book was called A Promise of Passion and featured Lucien and Francesca (sentimentally named after the heroine in the first romance novel I ever read). Following nineties-style Mills & Boon tradition, he was a tycoon and she was his secretary. There was the prerequisite villainess of an ex-fiancée named Krystal, prose so purple it was luminous, and—the crowning glory—an anatomically incorrect love scene.

We worked feverishly on our literary masterpiece. When it was finished, we sent it off to the Mills & Book offices in England, convinced we were going to be the next Penny Jordan. So we waited. And waited. And waited some more. Finally, more than a year after we’d sent the manuscript, we got a response. The editor politely but firmly rejected our book and suggested we “get a little life experience” before submitting material again. Much teenage weeping and gnashing ensued, but we were soon distracted by other things. Karen joined the school hockey team, and I discovered the joys of Georgette Heyer and Regency romance.

While I never stopped scribbling stories, it took me another 15 years to before I wrote a second romance novel, and a further 5 to truly learn my craft. In that time, I got a couple of degrees, learned two new-to-me languages, and moved countries a couple of times. I also got a little of that “life experience” that I’d lacked when writing A Promise of Passion. 😀

Love and Shenanigans is the eighth draft of that second finished romance novel. It’s the first in a series of humorous romance stories set in the same small Irish town. (I grew up in Dublin, but I spent my summers in a town similar to the fictitious Ballybeg.) Each novel and novella in the series stands alone and focuses on a different couple’s romance—HEAs guaranteed! Many of the secondary and tertiary characters appear in all the stories, and some will get their own books in the future.

AUTHOR BIO

Zara Keane grew up in Dublin, Ireland, but spent her summers in a small town very similar to the fictitious Ballybeg.

She currently lives in Switzerland with her family. When she’s not writing or wrestling small people, she drinks far too much coffee, and tries – with occasional success – to resist the siren call of Swiss chocolate.

Giveaway:

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