Ramblings From This Chick: Guest Post with Author Molly Harper and Giveaway

Saturday, October 12, 2013

Guest Post with Author Molly Harper and Giveaway

Meet Molly Harper, author of Rhythm and Bluegrass.

When Molly Harper was eight years old, she set up a “writing office” in her parents’ living room, complete with an old manual typewriter and a toy phone. And she (very slowly) pecked out the story of her third-grade class taking a trip around the world and losing a kid in each city. She had a dark sense of humor even then.

When Molly was considerably older, she headed for Western Kentucky University, where she majored in print journalism. After graduation, she landed a job with The Paducah Sun and married her high school sweetheart, David, a local police officer. After six years at the newspaper, Molly took a more family-friendly secretarial position at a local church office.

Her husband worked nights and Molly was alone with their small child in the “The Apartment of Lost Souls.” A big fan of vampire movies and TV shows, she decided to write a vampire romance novel. Molly created Jane Jameson, a bit of an accidental loser. Jane is single, almost 30, and a librarian working in Half-Moon Hollow, Ky. She has become a permanent fixture on her Mama’s prayer list. And despite the fact that she’s pretty good at her job, she just got canned so her boss could replace her with someone who occasionally starts workplace fires. Jane drowns her sorrows at the local faux nostalgia-themed sports bar. On her way home, she’s mistaken for a deer and shot by a drunk hunter. And then she wakes up as a vampire. The three-book Jane Jameson series–which includes Nice Girls Don’t Have Fangs,Nice Girls Don’t Date Dead Men and Nice Girls Don’t Live Forever—was released in 2009. A fourth and final installment, Nice Girls Don’t Bite Their Neighbors, was released in 2012.

Molly continues stories in the Jane Jameson universe through her Half-Moon Hollow series,Driving Mr. Dead, The Care and Feeding of Stray Vampires, Undead Sublet, and A Witch’s Handbook of Kisses and Curses. Undead Sublet is a short story in The Undead in My Bedanthology. A Witch’s Handbook of Kisses and Curses will be released in June 2013.

Molly will update her popular Naked Werewolf romance series in 2013. How to Flirt with a Naked Werewolf, was released in February 2011, quickly followed by The Art of Seducing a Naked Werewolf.

Molly will launch her first-ever contemporary romance series with My Bluegrass Baby in December 2012.

Molly’s books are published by Pocket Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. They are available in print, as e-books and audio books at major book stores and on Amazon. Molly is a native of Kentucky. She lives in Paducah with her husband and children.

Places to find Molly:

People sometimes ask whether any of my heroes are based on my husband, David.

Honestly, ALL of my heroes are based on my husband.

David and I were high school sweethearts. We basically grew up together, which explains why we share such a weird, quirky sense of humor and the propensity for talking a lot… really, really fast.

So David’s personality makes its way into all of my characters somehow. In my NICE GIRLS books, he loans his protectiveness and ability to banter to Gabriel and his occasionally inappropriate and filthy sense of humor to the vampire Dick Cheney. In my NAKED WEREWOLF books, he lends his furriness and ability to be all hot when he’s grumpy to Cooper. (My husband is NOT a morning person.) And in RHYTHM AND BLUEGRASS, he lends his leadership ability to Will McBride.

Like David, Will is one of those people who ends up being in charge of things. Will didn’t necessarily want to be elected mayor of Mud Creek, Kentucky, but the other candidates were write-in votes for cartoon characters. And being fictional, they were unable to serve. So Will has to take charge of Mud Creek, an embattled rural community that just lost its largest employer. Kentucky Commission of Tourism historian Bonnie Turkle rolls into town to sift through the artifacts left behind in McBride’s Music Hall, the long-abandoned concert venue originally owned by Will’s grandfather. Will lets Bonnie do as she pleases. He doesn’t care what happens to the music hall or its contents as long as he can knock it down to make way for an underwear factory that will provide much-needed jobs for his neighbors. It doesn’t hurt that Bonnie is pretty darned adorable and he enjoys bantering with her. Unfortunately, the artifacts Bonnie finds designate the music hall as a protected historical site, endangering Will’s factory plans. Will and Bonnie have to find a compromise that can save the music hall, the town and the growing flirtation between the two of them.

I enjoyed finding ways to fit David’s “take charge” tendencies into Will, while maintaining his sense of humor. David works as a captain with our local police department and he takes no small amount of ribbing from his coworkers about whether he is the inspiration for the bare-chested, sexy heroes on my book covers. Rather than being embarrassed, he just grins and gives a full-body wave. “That’s right,” he tells them. “It’s all right here.”

Bonnie Turkle, multimedia historian for the Kentucky Commission of Tourism, is dispatched to Mud Creek, a tiny eastern Kentucky town, with few prospects but many oddballs, to rescue important artifacts from McBride’s Music Hall. Now fallen beyond disrepair, McBride’s was once a jewel of the early American music scene, an intersection of the country-western and rhythm and blues circuits. The former owner’s grandson, Will McBride, who also happens to be Mud Creek’s esteemed mayor, would like nothing more than to see the place bull-dozed in favor of a factory that will provide much-needed jobs to his citizens. But Bonnie finds evidence of a legendary musical event at the music hall and her plans to turn it into a museum put Mud Creek’s economic future at risk – not to mention the growing flirtation between the two of them. If Will and Bonnie can’t find common ground, the town’s past and future will be lost.

Purchase: | Amazon | Barnes & Noble |

Check out the Bluegrass series: