Romance is Bliss Event with Paula Altenburg

Meet Bliss author, Paula Altenburg.

Paula Altenburg lives in rural Nova Scotia, Canada, with her husband and two sons. Once a manager in the aerospace industry, she now enjoys the freedom of working from home and writing full time. She currently writes demon westerns for Entangled Publishing.

Paula also co-authors paranormal romance under the pseudonym Taylor Keating.

Places to find Paula: 

| Site | Blog | Facebook | Twitter | 

I’ve been reading for what feels like forever. I love, love, love it.

Love.

And I love reading romance in particular because, no matter what kind of mood I’m in, there’s a story out there for me.

I have more of a love/hate relationship with writing, however. Confession time – I never wanted to be a writer. It looked like a lot of hard work and hard work makes me sweat.

I don’t like to sweat.

I didn’t chase writing. It chased me. In university, take-home exams, or year-end term papers, were a lot easier for me to write than trying to remember the details for finals.

Because details, it turns out, also make me sweat.

Every time I turned around, someone was looking for someone who could write. “Can anyone do this press release asap?” Or “I need an article on…” And later, at the day job, it became “Who’s going to write the technical response to this proposal?” If you really want to see someone sweat, try being the person responsible for organizing the technical content in a multi-million dollar response to a request for proposal and realizing writers are harder to come by than you’d think. That’s when you learn just how fast you can write under pressure.

Writing romance on a deadline is no different than any of the above. I knew that right from the start. That’s why I avoided it. But as much as I don’t like to sweat, I do enjoy the sense of accomplishment that comes from finishing a challenging project. I began to seriously think about writing for fun.

And writing romance has turned out to be fun. A lot of fun. But it’s also a lot harder than writing a response to a request for proposal, at least for me. Remember I mentioned how details make me sweat?

Romance novels are full of that stuff. And the writer is 100% responsible for all of it.

So that’s what I’m less than enthusiastic about. Now let me give you five reasons why I love it.

1. I love to make people think.
If my story resonates with even one person, then I feel I’ve done okay.

2. I love to make people feel.
Sometimes I want them to feel happy. Sometimes I want them to feel sad, at least for the characters. I want them to feel like they’re a part of the world I built. And always, I want them to feel like I gave them a good story.

3. I love to make people see.
I want my stories to come alive. I want people to see what I see when I write, or sometimes, I want them to come up with their own vision. That’s where detail comes in especially handy. Give a little, and the reader sees what they want. Give a lot, and they see what I want them to. Give too much, and you’ve got a travelogue.

4. I love to help people learn.
In Desire by Design, I take the reader into a business world I have a passing acquaintance with, but in which my sister lives every day. I love to hear her talk about her work. She told me it was strange to see her life in a book. That meant I’d done what I set out to do, and gotten the details reasonably right.

5. And I love to entertain people.
My category romances are deliberately light. I want these characters to be complex, but not so angst-ridden that they suck the joy out of life. I want the reader to believe in their happily ever after.

In Desire by Design, I hope I’ve made the reader experience at least some of the above. And what I’ve learned from all this?

Getting sweaty goes hand in hand with doing something you love.

He stole her job, and now she's stealing his heart.

Eve Doucette finally almost has it all. She's free from her mistake of an ex-husband and just landed her dream job: project manager for a new City Hall and drafter of the final design. That is, until a handsome architect sweeps into town to commandeer her blueprints.

Famous architect Matt Brison is unsatisfied with his mundane life in Toronto. So when the mayor of Halifax asks him to spearhead his City Hall project, Matt jumps at the opportunity. There's just one problem: the feisty and beautiful project lead, Eve, who isn't exactly thrilled about her new "coworker" hijacking her design.

But when the sparks begin to fly, they both find themselves falling for the colleague they shouldn't want. And before they know it, their already shaky foundation might come crumbling down...

Purchase: | Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Kobo |

Check out what's up for grabs.

Up For Grabs:

• 1 $20 Amazon Gift Card

To Enter: 

• Please leave a comment or question for Paula.
• Please fill out the Rafflecopter form.

**Don't forget to enter the grand prize giveaway!

Good Luck! 

Special thanks to Paula Altenburg for sponsoring this giveaway.

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