Ok, so some of these are old announcements, but some of these are new. Still, thank you for your patience! A lot has been going on, but never fear, contests DO end at the Pond, and prizes ARE always awarded.

Winners, you have one week to contact me about your prize.

The winner from Anya Bast’s Original Guest Post… for the last time… Shelley – you’re up! You’ve won a copy of Witch Heart!

Lauren Dane’s Giveaway winner … is Stacy!!! Congratulations You’ve won a copy of Taking Care of Business. Enjoy!

And… the lucky winners of What Happens in Vegas… After Dark are Christine, Little Lamb Lost, and Ann Marie. Congratulations, ladies!

All of you have been chosen by randomizer.org, or an unbiased third party. Again, you have ONE WEEK, so make sure you check the posting date and don’t miss the cutoff.  Please email your information to limecello@tgtbtu.com

And stay tuned for more exciting giveaways and fun. Especially all those fabulous Duck Chats.

Lauren: Hey everyone, thanks so much for having me here today!

If you got through the above silliness – you know a little bit about my upcoming contemporary erotic romance release, Taking Care of Business. One of my favorite things about the book is that I wrote it with my bestie, Megan Hart. We came up with the idea as a way to pass the time while waiting in line for a dinner at the 2007 RT Convention in Houston. The whole process has been a lot of fun and there’s something to be said about every once in a while taking a project that is just about fun – if the opportunity comes up, I highly recommend it! Megan and I have a lot of goofy fun so writing a book was really just a lot of us talking too much on IM and ripping ourselves off when we needed dialog. I’m sure it’s not always this enjoyable – this time around, I had a huge last minute deadline drop in while we were writing No Reservations and so we had to write around my schedule. Luckily, we know each other pretty well and we share the same basic attitude about work so it didn’t cause any tension. But a lot of the time, it was like, “I think Kate needs to go to a strip club with Dix.” And Megan would ping me back, “WHEEEEE!” Some days, this job is really fun.

I loved writing Katherine because she’s a woman who knows what she wants. She’s focused on her career and she knows the hard way that things in business are different for women than they are for men so she keeps a big wall between her personal life and her work life. I loved that about her character, I loved that she wasn’t a woman who hated sex or who was afraid of love, she just has to figure out if she can let someone from her work life into her personal life.

In her case, her man, Charles Dixon, isn’t having any excuses. But he’s respectful of her space and her independence. He doesn’t think she’s being silly but he wants her and he’s not going to let her walk out of his life until she admits she wants him too. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that in my head, Dix is totally Dr. Christian Troy from Nip/Tuck. Poor Dix, I think Kate sullied him a bit, and left him sweaty and weak kneed.

Anyway, it was a great experience. Two friends writing about two friends. The story is simple and straightforward with two adult women facing a lot of the same things many women face with men who aren’t jerks or too good to be true. I hope if you pick up TCOB you have as fun reading it as we had writing it.

Pre-Order from Amazon US – releases March 31, 2009
One conference, two friends, two men who know how to take care of business.
Blurb: After leaving the wrong man, Leah Griffin’s not ready to look for the right one. All she wants is to survive the conference she’s planning and spend some time with her best friend Kate Edwards. She’s not expecting the conference services manager to be so tall, dark and handsome…or so eager to please. It’s Brandon Long’s job to make Leah happy, but after a scorching interlude in her hotel room, neither can deny business has become pleasure.
Smart, driven and successful attorney, Katherine Edwards has spent her life making the right choices. Directly counter to those right choices, she’s involved in a long distance, secret love affair with a co-worker. Charles Dixon is a bad choice she can’t help but make – over and over. A conference and a promotion bring Kate back to Pennsylvania and suddenly, Dix wants far more than a few nights in random hotel rooms. He wants something permanent and Katherine has to figure out if sometimes a wrong choice isn’t exactly what a woman needs.

We had a great time with this project and were lucky enough to also sell the follow up book, NO RESERVATIONS which follows Kate and Dix, Leah and Brandon this time to Las Vegas

 [Ed note: Lauren is going to give away a copy of her book, so chime in and say incredibly witty things. It might just be your lucky day.]

Please welcome to the Pond today the wonderfully talented and funny Heidi Betts.  Her latest book Tangled Up in Love was released on February 3, 2009, and is the first book in her Chicks with Sticks trilogy. Love Me, Love Me Knot will be released in August 2009 and Knock Me For a Loop will follow in February of 2010.  

The new trilogy is based around a knitting group of which the heroines of each book, Ronnie, Jenna, and Grace, are members. Their respective heroes are Dylan, Gage, and Zack who are friends. The fun starts in Tangled Up in Love when Ronnie and Dylan, who work for competing newspapers, issue challenges via their papers to one other in a contest of man versus woman, which includes white water rafting, bungee jumping, mountain climbing, and, of course, learning to knit. And that’s only the beginning!

Now learn a little about the author who knits romance just as well as she does an Angora sweater.

I can’t thank Laura enough for inviting me to chat here at The Good, The Bad, & The Unread. When she first asked me to visit, she said that “Make a Splash” was pretty much an open slate & I could talk about anything I like. Ah, the power. It was tempting to take her up on the offer and do something truly wicked and wild. (For the record, I reserve the right to do that at some point in the future.)

Unfortunately, I recently wrapped up what we at my WIPs and Chains blog call the “Blog Tour 2009” and I haven’t quite recovered yet. The only things going through my brain are “Ohmigod, I’m so far behind on my next book!” and “It’s February already? Really? Where did January go?” So, being the generous and benevolent Lady of the Whip that she is, Laura offered to send me a series of interview questions instead. Ah, better. This I can do, I thought. And then I saw her questions. Lady of the Whip, indeed…she certainly doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to discovering her favorite author’s deepest, darkest secrets. (note to Heidi–shhhhh!! everyone here thinks I’m sweet and nice. And you can blame Sandy M. for the questions. Really, I am totally innocent here. *g*)

But anyway, here it goes:

Lightning Round:
- dark or milk chocolate? Dark may be better for you, but milk chocolate is the yummiest. Guess I’ll just have to get my antioxidants somewhere else.

- smooth or chunky peanut butter? Smooth, definitely. I like my peanut butter to get stuck to the roof of my mouth, not stuck in my teeth. *g*

- heels or flats? Well, I like fancy heels best, but since they pretty much make me look like a giraffe on roller skates when I wear them, I’ve gotta go with the comfy, casual, blister-free answer of flats.

- coffee or tea? Tea! All day, every day! Hot’s okay, but I like it better cold. Coffee—gack! I don’t know how anybody drinks that stuff.

- summer or winter? Neither. I prefer Spring & Fall. Summer gets too hot and winter gets too cold. Though the “not-too” times of each of those seasons are okay.

- mountains or beach? Oh, man, that’s a toughie. I love the mountains because of the seclusion and nature. Of course, that’s only if there’s a nice, comfortable cabin with heat, electricity, and running water nearby. If we’re talking sleeping on the ground and dealing with all kinds of bugs and critters… No, thank you. I love, love, love the beach. Except for the sun. But sand and water are wonderful. Of course, that’s as long as you don’t go too far into the water, because then we might be talking sharks, jelly fish, barracudas, and even sharp shells or stones that would cut the bottoms of my delicate feet.

- mustard or mayonnaise? Mayo! Hate, hate, hate mustard! (Except the wee bit they put on McDonald’s hamburgers. Don’t ask me why, but I can tolerate it there.)

- flowers or candy? Ahhh, can’t I have both? Please?!? Okay, I’m picky about my candy, so if I can’t have the good stuff, I’d rather have flowers. But I prefer live flowers over cut ones, so if they were just going to die in a week, I might have to go back to candy.

- pockets or purse? A purse. No, not a purse, a tote. And not just any tote…a bag the size of a small elephant. I need a dolly to drag my purse around most days, but God forbid I be without anything I might need when I’m out and about.

- Pepsi or Coke? Coke! Diet Cherry Coke, if you’ve got it.

- ebook or print? Print. Gotta have a book in my hands. Gotta be able to see and stroke the cover, turn the pages, smell the ink and glue that hold them all together. Gotta be able to mark my place with a good old-fashioned bookmark and come back to it later.

-knit or crochet? Ah-ha! A trick question. You’re trying to get me into trouble, aren’t you? Considering that I’m currently writing and promoting a series of sexy-hot and crazy-funny romance novels that are all about knitting, I’m going to have to go with KNITTING! (Ha! You can’t trip me up that easily, Laura!) Although I do actually crochet, too, and enjoy it just…I mean almost as much.

Some other fun stuff:

1. What is your favorite word?

Floccinaucinihilipilification. It’s the longest word in the English language (not counting medical terms and such) and I’ve always loved it, mostly because I can pronounce it. When my mother was teaching, if she heard a student using the F-word, she would take them aside and tell them that they could either take detention or sit and write her F-word—complete with definition—25 or 50 times. I just always thought it was fun to say—and fun to watch people’s eyes glaze over when you use it in conversation. *g*

2. What is your least favorite word?

No. I do not like to be told I can’t do or have something. I mean I really don’t like it. And it usually just makes me angry enough or more determined to figure how I darn well can do or have what it is I want.

3. What turns you on creatively, spiritually or emotionally?

Would it be wrong of me to say Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson? Oh, come on. Look at that man and tell me he doesn’t get your juices flowing in every way. 

4. What turns you off creatively, spiritually or emotionally?

I’m going to sound like a total snob here, but I have to admit that bad writing and bad grammar drive me batty. I’m not a complete Grammar Nazi; I mean, I won’t jump down your throat if you end a sentence with a preposition and even—gasp!—do it myself from time to time. But I refuse to go through the “10 Items or Less” lines at the grocery store on principle and nearly go into spasms over the misuse of who/that. I know, I know, but it’s a deeply ingrained pet peeve. I think it comes from being raised by two school teachers (see Question 9), one of whom went to parochial school, where bad grammar meant getting your knuckles rapped by a ruler-wielding nun. *shudders*

5. What sound or noise do you love?

I love to listen to my cats purr. I don’t know how they do it and each one is unique, but it’s just adorable and melts my heart every time—even when I’m mad at them.

6. What sound or noise do you hate?

Well, nails on a chalk board is right up there. And, omg, the sound of a nail file (the gritty, sandpaper kind) scraping against anything but an actual fingernail. Sends shivers down my spine every single time.

7. What is your favorite curse word?

I’m the daughter of a Navy man, so I have lots of favorite curse words—not many of which are fit for print. “Son of a bitch” is a favorite and oft-muttered swear in my house, and I’ve also always been fond of “funky butt-lovin,” (from Rookie of the Year), which is exceptionally satisfying to use when you stub your toe or such.

8. What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?

Other than exotic dancer or space cowgirl? I’d have to say something that has me working with animals—veterinarian, marine biologist, Head Clubber who clubs the [dirty word]s who club seals…

9. What profession would you not like to do?

Just about anything Mike Rowe has done on Dirty Jobs. Yuck. I also would not like to be a teacher in any way, shape, or form. Both of my parents were teachers, and I don’t know how they do it. I swear, I would kill half my class within the first twenty minutes (yes, even the younger kids) and run screaming from the building in forty.

10. If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?

Well, a warm welcome would be nice. I certainly wouldn’t be happy if He said, “Hi, you’re dead, but you also took a wrong turn. You want to go back the way you came, hang a left instead of a right, and follow the escalator going dooooowwwwwn.” Yikes! Other than that, I would really like to know that I’m going to get to be with my dad and all my babies again, and I don’t care if He tells me that or just points me in the right direction.

It’s me again. Heidi has generously offered up to three (3) posters and a book from her backlist.  Even though this doesn’t include Tangled Up in Love,  there are several other very good books to choose from. You have all weekend to enter and we’ll have Heidi draw the winners on Monday (2/22/09).  In the mean time, if you are looking for a really good book to read and keep you warm on the cold winter nights, pick up Tangled Up in Love and check out Heidi’s blogs at WIPs and Chains and Must Love Yarn.

Thanks for hanging out in the pond with us, Heidi!!

Sunday Afternoon at the B&N Café

Almost every Sunday afternoon I flee my house of chaos for the Barnes & Noble Café. It’s a long drive for me, so usually I go to a local coffee shop to get a little uninterrupted writing time. However, I prefer the B&N Café because you have to pay for Internet access (at my little local coffee shop, it’s free), which means I don’t buy it and I actually write instead of procrastinate by checking my email, playing on Livejournal or Twitter or hunting down eBook pirates (my own private and pointless obsession).

The chairs are fairly comfortable, the staff is friendly (I’m in the B&N Café as I write this, in fact), and once I plug myself into my iPod, the auditory environment is conducive to writing. I like to try and get a table that backs up to a wall so no one can read over my shoulder, especially if I’m about to write a sex scene…which I intend to do right after I finish writing this post. Today I snagged a wall table, so today is a good B&N Café day.

Muted conversation fills my ears, since I don’t have my ear buds in yet. So does the gurgling sound of the café staff making coffee. The scent of that coffee fills my nose, along with the faint aroma of the woman’s perfume beside me. I can also hear the clinking of change at the register, the beeping of machinery, the sound of a child crying in another part of the store.

Today I’m wearing a comfy black sweater with black running pants and fuzzy red socks. On a totally different topic, Limecello gave me a list of possible subjects to write on and one of them was about my favorite kind of socks. You’re probably all just dying to know that I prefer slipper socks and wear them most of the time in the winter. As a full time writer, I can get away with that. Comfort is my first priority. A fashionista, I am not.

Back to the topic at hand, I get a lot of writing done at the cafe. I write for a while, then stop and think, staring out over the top of my laptop with my eyes unfocused. I’m not really seeing anything because I’m deep in thought, thinking about the scene I’m writing or how I need the next part of this particular chapter to show something significant about a certain character, set up for an upcoming battle or black moment, or show how the relationship between my hero and heroine is evolving. I do a lot of staring and thinking when I write.

That doesn’t mean I’m not aware of my surroundings. On the contrary, I’m hyper-aware of everyone around me. I think most writers are. Writers observe. They take in all people and events around them and consider them. For a writer everything and everyone around them is potential inspiration or story fodder. . Today there’s a woman next to me who is dressed in a stylish fawn colored sweater dress and expensive looking thigh-high boots (her perfume smells expensive too). She’s reading a stack of books on divorce. I can’t help but wonder about her, who she married and why they’re divorcing. I can’t help but make up stories to fill in the gaps about what I don’t know about her. . What about that man in his mid twenties in the corner who is pounding away on his laptop like me? Writer? Or grad student?

And there’s clutch of women in the corner that’s obviously a book club since they all have the same mass market paperback on the table beside them-with the title I can’t quite make out – and who are clearly having a wonderful time and not talking about books.

The man at two o’clock is flipping through a book by Mike Huckabee and has Sean Hannity sitting jowl-to-jowl with Michael Savage (books by those men, I mean, not the actual men). He keeps furtively checking out the well-heeled women who is reading the books on divorce.

The chess players are here again. They’re here every single week-the same people scowling down at the boards, scratching their heads and trying to figure out their next move. Another group of women are in the corner. It’s a study group for library science, unless I miss my guess. I can tell their relationship is tentative and new (probably the first time they’ve studied together) because of the nervous chatter and the self-conscious laughter. It’s the kind of communication one engages in when one is not totally sure. . It strikes me every week how many people come here to do things other than drink coffee and consider their purchases. People come to study, write novels or dissertations. They use it as a library, pulling books up next to themselves along with a pad of paper and pen to take notes. The woman on my other side is angry that so many people are making noise (the noise culprits are the library science group and the two tables in front of us who have struck up a conversation about football) and is hissing into her cell phone about how people should be quieter here. of one’s audience.

Except, of course, this isn’t a library…it’s a bookstore. Me? I just put my ear buds in and turn to my sex scene….

*P.S.-  Anya, because she is awesome, has very kindly offered to give away an autographed copy of her recent release Witch Heart to one lucky commenter. Not that you wouldn’t have stopped by to chat with her anyway, right?

Sorry about that, I don’t do tables well and lime is used to doing ponderings that don’t need a ‘cut’.

To make up for the long delay, here is Lisa Kleypas new author picture.

It was taken by her husband Greg in their back yard.

It is tres cute yes?  You should be able to click on it to make it larger, if not maybe gwen will come along and do the thing gwen does best and fix it *g*.

read on for the winzors

WOOT! Smooth Talking Strangers is fabulous.  And we will post more info when we it regarding when Lisa will be here to chat about the book.  And of course I am already trying to rope a Raw look at her next historical cuz well I am like that *eg*.

Well, a number of you, anyway. Remember a long time ago when we had the contest for Lisa Kleypas’s books? One for A Wallflower Christmas and another for an Advanced Reader Copy (ARC) of Smooth Talking Stranger? . And remember how I said I’d begin a monthly contest? I also said that  for January, I’d pick it from one specific post, and I did- though that won’t normally be the case. So without further ado, here is a list of all the winners. . The one I think we all want to know most….

1) The winner of an ARC of Smooth Talking Stranger is Kate Niswander! . And as chosen by randomizer.org, the following winners are:2) The three winners of A Wallflower Christmas are Kim, CrystalGB, and Carolyn Jean! . and last but not least, the winner of . 3) Happy New Year!!! is … Sherry Thomas! . Congratulations, winners! Please use the “quack at us” link (which I also provided). And stay tuned for future contests and events! For example, Anya Bast visits with us this Friday, the 6th, for our next “Author Makes a Splash” post.

by Megan Hart

Hello, everyone! Thanks for having me here at what I see is affectionately called “the pond.” I hope you all don’t mind that I’m wearing arm floaties and a swim cap.

Limecello kindly asked me to be here today and told me I could either talk about whatever I wanted, or she’d shoot me some random suggestions. What was her first random suggestion, you ask?

I know you love Supernatural so… does the television you watch influence your writing, and if so how?

Yes, I do love Supernatural. I love it like frogs love flies. I love it so much I have actually cried real tears thinking about the day it will no longer be on the air. I am not even kidding. . How do the television shows I watch influence my writing? Well, I really only watch a couple of TV shows…Supernatural and Nip/Tuck – I might get back into Lost this year but I’m not sure. I watch TV on DVD more often than “real” time…but sure, what I watch influences me. Mostly everything influences me. It gives me ideas for storylines, for one thing. For another…guh, Jensen and Jared are made of so much wonderful I can’t help but be inspired to write hot love scenes. Right? If I’m lyin’, I’m dyin’. . But let’s talk about inspiration. For me, it comes from so many places. I went to a local charity event yesterday, one I’ve gone to for years and yet for the first time I said, OMG! I TOTALLY NEED TO PUT THIS IN A BOOK! And now I will!

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Often when I go back through my manuscripts, I can remember exactly what I was doing, or what was going on in my life, by what the characters in the books are doing. A certain drink, the weather, a location – in STRANGER, for example, Grace and Sam go to a horror movie marathon (in the original manuscript Grace and JACK went to the movie marathon!) and that came about because I had gone to just such a thing with my sister. I could’ve sent Grace and Sam on a date to something else, but I used the horror movie marathon because it was something I’d done and was fresh in my head. . That’s not to say that everything in every book comes right out of my own experiences, because my goodness, who’d have time! I do enjoy making stuff up a lot, too. Or extrapolating from my own experiences to guess at a different outcome.

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DEEPER, my upcoming release from Spice (July 2009) has a lot of my own experiences in it, though not exactly the way they happened to me. I took bits and pieces, wove them together, split them apart, made stuff up and generally wrote a FICTIONAL story with real-life inspiration behind it. Some of those emotions and scenes are real, they really happened, just not necessarily the way they do in the book. I mean, really, what’s the point of writing a book if you can’t make it all end the way you want it to, even if it didn’t happen that way in real life? I am the puppet-master! I control the horizontal AND the vertical, my doves…and I love it. I love spring boarding – taking something that happened either to me or that I’ve seen or heard about from someone else, and saying, “what if…?” . For me, it’s all about the “what if…?”

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And that’s how inspiration works for me.

How about you? Do you like knowing when something has come from the author’s real life? Does it ruin the story for you? If you know anything about the author and you read something you know came from a real-life experience, does it make you feel like part of an inside joke or throw you out of the story?

And finally, Limecello sent this topic, too, which I have to answer: What do you think of Cheetos? I hardly ever think of Cheetos. I mostly just eat them furtively out of the package in the pantry, in the dark, as though eating them where nobody can see me might make them calorie and fat-free. Hmm, now when you all read about a character sneaking Cheetos in the pantry, you’ll know where that came from.

Again, thanks for having me here today!

M