Author Guest Post & Giveaway: Eliza Daly

Fake It, Don’t Bake It or Make It: A Busy Girl’s Guide to Surviving the Holidays
  
This holiday advice column is brought to you by Monica Jackson, the heroine in my debut romance novel, Under Her Spell. It is the second column in the series. Her first column is Deck the Halls with Stress Balls: How to Bring Inner Peace and Joy to Your Holidays.
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Stressed is desserts spelled backwards. Appropriate, since baking stresses me out, and when I’m stressed, I eat massive amounts of chocolate, and gaining weight is stressful. My cousin Hope makes Martha Stewart look like a total slacker, so I figured she’d be playing domestic elf this year—baking, cooking, and decorating our townhouse. But her no-good cheating hubby is giving her a large divorce settlement for Christmas, so she’s celebrating by popping a champagne cork on a two-week cruise. I can’t skip the holidays. I love the holidays, and this is one of the busiest times for my romantic event planning company.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from my stressful job, it’s that you need to look like you’ve got it together even when you don’t. I suffered panic attacks a few months back when Reed, a divorce lawyer, moved in next to my business. It wasn’t pretty. However, Reed turned out to be good for my stress. A lot of people experience a high level of stress around the holidays because they are perfectionists and insist on doing everything themselves. So here are my top time management ideas and how I’m going to enjoy a perfectly imperfect holiday.

1) The Island of Misfit Cookies. Last year, I bought gingerbread cookie dough for a holiday party, and then I realized I didn’t own cookie cutters or a rolling pin. No time to run to the store, I rolled out the dough with a glass and found a gingerbread cookie cutter online and printed it out. Half of the cookies ended up with frowning faces, and I even decapitated a few. So this year, I asked Hope to make my cookies before she starts sailing the high seas. Hope owns a cake decorating business and her cookies are a work of art. I can’t pass off perfect cookies as my own, so she made me some skinny Santa cookies with fuchsia colored suits, one-eyed gingerbread men, and reindeer without antlers. Hope’s misfit cookies business is taking off. However, she has to be discreet or her secret will be out and she’ll lose her clients.

2) Recruit Elves. I’ve started over twenty businesses. When I was ten years old, I dressed up as an elf and went around the neighborhood offering my gift wrapping services. I was an awful wrapper and once mistakenly wrapped a centerpiece and salt ‘n pepper shakers that were sitting on a client’s table. I didn’t last more than one season. My wrapping skills haven’t improved and everyone knows this. So I’m hiring a nine-year-old neighbor girl to wrap my presents. I’m also having her wrap the pictures on my walls, which will make festive decorations.

3) Dual-Purpose Cards. Last year, my cousin Ellie posted her annual Christmas brag letter on Facebook and asked everyone to share it with friends and family who weren’t on Facebook. Rather than being put out that she wanted us to distribute her letter, we were happy that Ellie wasn’t so perfect after all. This gave me the idea to do e-cards this year. I emailed photo cards of my assistant and me dressed as somewhat sexy elves and her cute little Shih Tzu dressed as Santa, standing in front of my business. I posted this photo on Facebook with our business address and a caption reading We can help you be a little naughty, or nice, this season with your significant other. Not sure if it was the cute little dog or our sexy elf outfits, but the promo just went viral on Facebook. You may have already seen it.

4) Voila—A Holiday Feast. I’ve been watching Hope cook for the past few months, and if there is one thing I’ve learned—the only thing—is that cooking is all about presentation. Hope and her soon-to-be ex owned a restaurant, so she knows the secret of haute cuisine is small portions, stacking and garnishes. I’m going to buy deli turkey with the fixings and reheat the turkey on Christmas Day in a slow cooker so the aroma fills the air. Then all I have to do is place a few spoonfuls of mashed potatoes on a plate, top it with a dollop of stuffing, slap a slice of turkey over it then drizzle with gravy. Garnish the plate with a few cranberries.

5) Indoor-Outdoor Decorations. We recently had a major snowstorm in Milwaukee. Go figure. School was cancelled. When I came home from work, some kids who live in an apartment building without a yard were building a snowman in the dirty snow plowed up on a curb. I offered them my yard. I asked them to decorate the snowmen with red and green attire and to build them in front of my windows, so they could be enjoyed inside or outside. Of course this only works if you have snow.

6) Deck the Halls with Stress Balls: How to Bring Inner Peace and Joy to Your Holidays. This is the title of my first advice column published on November 14th at Urban Girl Reader. It offers suggestions on how to reduce holiday stress. I hope my two columns, along with some deep yoga breaths, help you survive the holiday season!
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Which of Monica’s suggestions do you like the best? What do you do to simplify your holidays?

Giveaway! I will be giving away two e-copies of Under Her Spell and a $20 Amazon or Barnes & Noble gift certificate. To be eligible to win one of these prizes, please answer both of the above questions. Include your e-mail address with your comment and check back here on December 3rd when the winners will be announced in the comment section.  

Thank you so much to Nancy and The Chick Lit Bee for helping me celebrate the release of Under Her Spell!

Book Description
When a series of failed relationships and business ventures have Monica Jackson doubting her self-worth, she turns to spell casting to attract positive energy and the opportunities needed to achieve her goals.  But can Monica’s belief in spells restore her belief in herself? Monica creates a spell to find her soul mate, and one to ensure the success of her new romantic event planning company, Enhance Your Romance.  Monica is confident she has found her niche until divorce lawyer Reed Walker opens a practice next door to her office.  The anti-marriage slogan plastered on his office window, and his down-on-love clients, quickly prove detrimental to Monica’s business.  When his arrival appears to trigger a string of bad luck, Monica fears one of her spells sent negative energy into the universe and it has returned to her threefold.  Although Reed is beyond sexy, and she admires his self-confidence, she’ll do whatever it takes to get the universe back on her side, and Reed out of her life. No way is she losing another business. Reed finds himself attracted to Monica’s beauty and her optimism. His job and his parents’ divorce have made him a pessimist, especially when it comes to love. However, he soon finds that Monica’s pro-love attitude is rubbing off on him, causing him to lose his edge.  If Reed doesn’t distance himself from Monica, he’ll likely destroy his reputation as a pit bull divorce lawyer. Can Monica and Reed look past what they might be losing to realize the love they have found? Under Her Spell is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iTunes, Kobo, and eBooks.
 
About the Author 
Eliza Daly’s first attempt at creative writing was in fourth grade. She and her friends were huge Charlie’s Angels fans and she would sit in her bedroom at night writing scripts for them to act out at recess the following day. She was Kelly Garrett. Fast forward to the present, she’s still writing stories about beautiful women who always get their men. The journey from fourth grade script writer to published author wasn’t an easy one, but it was always an adventure and the final destination was well worth it. When Eliza isn’t traveling for her job as an event planner, or tracing her ancestry roots through Ireland, she’s at home in Milwaukee working on her next novel, bouncing ideas off her husband Mark, and her cats Quigley and Frankie. You can find Eliza on the Web at her Website, Facebook, Twitter, and Goodreads.

Guest Post: The Making of The Dinner Party


I spent extra time seasoning the asparagus, and put veritable love into my neat, almost mosaic arrangement of garlic cloves on the filets of sole. I stirred simmering pots with patience, and folded napkins elegantly. All the while I clicked back and forth across my kitchen floor, wearing four-inch Manolo Blahniks, balancing the slender neck of my wine glass between my forefinger and thumb. All this--for what, exactly? A dinner party for my oldest friend and her hubby, before we had mortgages, before we had mouths to feed other than our own, before we reached our thirtieth birthdays. Except for him. He was thirty-four. Maybe that’s why he thought he knew more than the rest of us. Why he thought he could waltz to the table, insert a forkful of fish into his mouth, and spew out, “it needs more salt.”

Just like that, my hard work flew right out the window and splattered onto East 65th Street. I was furious—at him for his feckless affront, and at her, for refusing to keep her pit-bull on a tighter leash. But what could I do? I was the hostess, after all. I was raised with a decent degree of manners for a New Yorker—a Brooklyn girl, at that. Would I whine about it the following week in therapy? Waste precious minutes and out-of-network dollars on sole and the soulless? Silly, no! I would write a novel instead.

And so, The Dinner Party, began to gestate. For nearly five years. While in real life, I recovered from my bad review pretty quickly, and signed a lasting peace with my food-critic friend (at least in matters of the kitchen), I decided that the tense dynamic between friends and their significant others could be a launching pad for something—perhaps, the story of friends, spouses, and lovers unraveling, with a dinner party as the catalyst.

After workshopping, revising, rewriting, editing, stagnating, wasting time, almost giving up, suddenly editing again and querying agents, and finally, discovering self-publishing, I was ready to take the plunge, upload my work to Kindle and Create Space, and begin to sell my debut novel, The Dinner Party on Amazon.com. It isn’t perfect. No book is—there is always something an author can look back on and want to change, take out completely, or rearrange. Yes, there’s a typo (or three), much to my chagrin. But if Simon and Schuster can let a comma fall by the wayside, can’t Jenny Ladner Brenner?

The Dinner Party is light, laugh-out-loud chick-lit, and is intended to radiate fun. The positive feedback has given me a rush like no other, and I feel grateful that many readers have not only liked the book, but have taken the time to tell me.  Writing a novel taught me a valuable lesson—whether it’s fish or fiction— there will be good reviews and kinda-psycho-scary ones. I try my best to appreciate both (with emphasis on try) and who knows? Maybe an online-hater will guest star as my next novel’s villain…

Synopsis of The Dinner Party:

Sometime back in seventh grade, Lainie and Miya pinky swore to attend the same college, snag gorgeous husbands, and live next door to one another for the rest of their lives. But is post-grad life ever what one imagines? Lainie Silver is twenty-eight, attractive, razor-sharp, and is nonetheless trapped in a mind-numbing job and a romantic slump. Sure, she’s thankful for a steady paycheck, a Fifth Avenue address, and minimal sagging of tenuous body parts. But it doesn’t seem fair that Miya managed to wangle a glamorous career as a celebrity make-up artist and a “perfect” marriage to Jake, a chef at The Union Square Café. Both are unbearable reminders of the novel Lainie can’t seem to write and the elusive love she craves. After hosting a tense dinner party (and throwing back one too many cocktails), Lainie succumbs to bitterness and bad judgment when Jake shows up at her apartment. Though Lainie can’t stand him, this minor detail doesn’t matter in the drunken haze of seduction. Eight minutes later, after mediocre sex and a hard look at the philanderer passed out on her couch, Lainie knows that her friendship—potentially her entire life—will never be the same. Determined to keep her secret, with guilty angst and acerbic wit as her must-have accessories, Lainie tries to resume so-called normalcy. This proves more difficult than she thought: she gets fired for taking too long a lunch, settles into the comfort of a boring relationship only to be cheated on when she least expects it, has a fender bender with her first love on the Long Island Expressway, and realizes she is wildly attracted to her new boss, Noah. Against the warnings of Miya and her nagging mother, Lainie nestles in to Noah’s world of custom suits and imported cars. She even lets him in on her one-night stand with Jake. She never (ok—hardly) suspects he could one day be the cause of all their undoing...

To purchase The Dinner Party, please visit Amazon. 
To read more from Jenny Ladner Brenner, join her blog at: http://j-what.onsugar.com.
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Guest Post: Marty Moments

By Erin Brady

If you ask any author the question of when they started writing, they will most likely tell you that it all started the moment they were born.  And it’s true!  I’m fairly certain that the first words that popped out of my mouth were, “Can I have a pen and a piece of paper, please? I’ve got this great idea for a book.”

OK, so I am exaggerating a bit and maybe showing my age too (because now it would be “Can I have a keyboard and a mouse, please? I need to tweet”). Still, I think all writers share that same experience. It’s about exploring surroundings, looking at the people around you and telling a good story. Let’s face it. Life is fascinating and so are the people in it. 

For me, it’s also about making people laugh.  I love to laugh.  I find it’s the best remedy to any problem life throws at you.  I also think that we all experience funny moments that take us by surprise.  

It’s those funny moments that are central to my chick lit book And The Winner Is.  People who have read my book have told me that they now live their lives in ‘Marty moments.’  That is truly flattering to me because that is what I hoped would happen when I sat down and created the character of Martha Peters.  For those of you who haven’t read the book and are not sure what this is exactly, ‘Marty moments’ are those little blips of time in your life where something chaotic, improbable, or embarrassing happens.  Where you find yourself in an unpredictable situation and can laugh at yourself much later on, with a glass of wine, as you retell the story to your best girlfriends.  

Although you may find yourself utterly mortified when those ‘Marty moments’ happen, the truth is that those moments are little gifts in life, the moments that make you reassess your priorities or that shift your dreams and goals.  For me, it’s the bend in the road, the blind spot, the uphill climb before you have yet to see the spectacular view from the top of a mountain.  I guess that’s why I absolutely love Marty because every one of us has a part of her in each of us.   We all struggle up that mountain and find ourselves in impossible situations but we still keep going, knowing that eventually it will make for a great story, eventually we’ll marvel at the view.  I also love Marty because she makes me laugh and who doesn’t need a good laugh every once in a while?

Sometimes I catch myself asking, “What would Marty do?”  What would Marty do if the top of her bikini came off at the town pool?  What would Marty do if she unintentionally let out a very loud burp at a meeting with her boss? What would Marty do if she congratulated a woman on the impending birth of her child when she isn’t really pregnant?

I know what she would do!  She’d get up, brush herself off and keep going, hopefully learning from her mistakes, but also not letting them get the better of her.  I have to remember that the next time I walk out of a public restroom with toilet paper trailing out of my backside.  Just enjoy the ride and learn how to laugh at myself in the process.  I know Marty would. 

Giveaway! Please leave a comment to enter to win 1 eBook copy of Erin Brady's novel, And The Winner Is. Winner will be chosen at random on Saturday, September 22nd. Please include your email address or social networking account so we can get in touch if you win. Good luck! 

The Best Laid Plans Often Go Awry…


I had plans to write the great American novel. It would be dramatic. It would be terribly serious. It would have so many complex facets of human nature and morality, that schools would probably add it to their required reading curriculum. That was the book I thought I was going to write. After all, those were the books I usually read.

My serious foray into serious writing did not come easily though. I would have an idea, get a little way into the story, and then it would all fizzle out. I couldn't understand my problem, until the day that the light bulb (in the form of my friend Aly) went off. Aly, in all her wisdom, said the five words that altered everything. "You should write something funny."

The moment I changed the tone and voice of my novel to something more akin to a romantic comedy, the story came easily (and by "easily" I mean I was able to actually finish the novel instead of giving up in a miserable heap of failure that would drive me to do a marathon of Dying Young and Steel Magnolias while eating Ben & Jerry's Everything But The flavored ice cream). For the first time, my writing felt "natural." Even better, my novel turned into something I wanted to read…and it led me to explore a whole world of novels I had never read before. I discovered Emily Giffin and Jen Lancaster. I laughed along with Sophie Kinsella and Helen Fielding. If I hadn't written a "chick lit" novel, I might have never found the genre that I now love so much.

However, finding my voice as a writer was only half the battle. The rest of the journey from a novel-in-theory, to a novel-in-print, has been a completely different beast. Naturally, I assumed that the positive feedback I received from my friends and family, who have to love what I do, would translate into an agent immediately signing me. A year and a whole room wallpapered in rejection letters later, I knew that getting my book to the masses wasn't going to be as easy as I had thought.

I had some very positive feedback from respected agents and some serious interest from smaller publishing companies, and was going to go that route, until I discovered indie publishing. After a lot of research, I decided to take a chance and publish my work myself on Amazon's KDP program. There are benefits to self-publishing that a smaller publishing company couldn't provide…and there are definitely some detriments, the most difficult being promotion.

As a self-published author, marketing my book can sometimes feel like having a second job, but it is a job that I embrace. Writing is the thing I love to do, and anything I do in support of that feels well worth the time.

Giveaway! Please leave a comment to enter to win 1 eBook copy of Emily Shaffer's novel, That Time of the Month. Winner will be chosen at random on Monday, September 17th. Please include your email address or social networking account so we can get in touch if you win. Good luck!  
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5 Ways to Find Your Writing Mojo


If the words won't budge or you're feeling the story is less than inspired, might I suggest these tips for getting your writing mojo back?

1. Move.
No, not to another state. Hey, your muse can't be *that* bad. Instead, write in a different location, even if it's just across the room. While some writers prefer routine and ritual, when you're feeling stuck, sometimes the best antidote is to get a fresh perspective with a change of scenery. I rotate between two different tables on my deck and one favorite coffee shop. Works like a charm. 

2. Dig deeper.
If your story has hit a brick wall, it could be because the character doesn't have enough oomph to scale it or you've cornered yourself against the brick wall with a going nowhere plot. Dig deeper into the goal and motivation and put more obstacles in the path for the character so you'll have plenty to get revved up about and your fingers will be flying. Feel free to skip ahead if something isn't working and come back to it later with fresh eyes.

3. Reward thyself. Punishment works, too.
A lot of Type A writers like to give themselves rewards for hitting word count or page goals. I'm a bit meaner with myself, such as not letting myself work on other projects until I've finished my fiction goal. That keeps me off of social media until I'm through and I don't feel guilty doing a bit of surfing after I've met my goals.

4. Turn off the tech.
If you're avoiding the page because you're stuck, you could be doing "busy" work, such as research or networking or blogging instead of the dirty (but fun!) work of getting your story down. Turn off your phone (silence at least, and *don't* answer it), wait to respond to e-mail and go widescreen on your document to block out the other apps and lures on your desktop. I use Omm when I'm writing a fresh story and even bought the iPad app so I can "move" to the deck and write instead of depending on my desktop inside.

5. Hit the road.
Sometime the best way to get unstuck is to not think about it at all. Think about Virginia Woolf's famous walks. And meditation is supposed to change the circuitry of your brain so you can think better and react more positively anytime you get stuck. Personally, when I'm feeling butt-in-seat-syndrome and need some energy, I like to turn up Pandora and do a quick Zumba dance to one song. My heart rate goes up and I feel refreshed to get back to the writing. (And drink lots of water.) 

What about you? What kind of writing mojo tips would you like to share?
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An eBook Novella 

Summer, sisterhood and sacred answers in paradise.

Mojo and fitness guru, Rachel Woods, takes the attendees at her "Mojo in Maui" conference through adventures on the magic island to discover their deepest desires and fears. Readers will catch up with characters from Lott's previous novels: Ramona (Dating da Vinci), Taylor (The Stork Reality), Macy (Fixer Upper), Georgia (Life’s a Beach) and get introduced to Kelly, who gets her own novel, Something New, in Fall 2012.

The six women converge at the luxury resort in Maui at a time when their lives are at a crossroads, personally and professionally. From the workaholic Taylor, to the newly-divorced mom with an identity crisis Georgia, to the broken-hearted Kelly, the island helps them find their own mojo for what matters most. And their fearless leader, Rachel, has a secret of her own that set the whole chain of events in motion.

The Last Resort is Lott's sexiest read to date and sure to be a popular beach read for women everywhere. Readers may especially wish they had magic chocolate and the Kealoha brothers on the mainland. 

Told with Lott's trademark humor and heart, The Last Resort may be just the ticket for mojo women are looking for this summer. 

About Malena Lott  
 
Malena Lott is the author of three novels, two novellas, several short stories and also writes young adult under the pen name Lena Brown. Readers can connect with her on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram under malenalott, and she blogs about mojo and zen at malenalott.com. Be sure and check out The Last Resort BIG Beach Read Bonanza contest with 20 free reads and lot of beach swag at www.buzzbooksusa.com/contest. Ends 6/30/12.