Tall Tales with Jane Graves

by Suzanne Welsh

Jane, welcome back to the Bandit Lair, pull up a chair and make yourself comfortable. As you can see we've done a bit of remodeling since your last visit. Over there is the Golden Rooster's nest, and those gentleman bearing trays of drinks and decadant chocolate desserts are our Vrai Anna's hockey hunks and Joanie T's Roman gladiators, aka the cabana boys.

Thanks for the welcome. Nice remodeling job. Send one of those cabana boys my way.

Your newest book, Tall Tales And Wedding Veils, was just released on May 27th. It's your second contemporary romance for Grand Central Publishing. Can you tell us a little bit about this story?

Heather's a straight-laced woman who never met a detail she didn't like. Tony's a sexy charmer who never met a woman he couldn't seduce. After a chance meeting in Vegas, she ends up helping him win the $20,000 he needs to buy the business of his dreams. They wake up the next morning with hangovers from hell and their names together on a marriage license.

Through a crazy turn of events, they're forced to stay married for a month pretending to be happy newlyweds when nothing could be further from the truth. But it isn't long before the playboy and the plain-Jane begin to see each other in an entirely new light!

We first met the hero, Tony McCaffrey, as the skirt-chasing lothario of the repo shop in Hot Wheels And High Heels. How has his life changed since we last saw him?

He's decided to go into business for himself by buying a bar & grill. He figures it's a helluva deal. He can do what he's best at - drinking, chasing women, and being the life of the party - and get paid for it at the same time. But he's going to figure out really fast that there's a big difference between sitting on a stool in front of a bar and working behind it. The heroine of Tall Tales And Wedding Veils is an accountant, Heather Montgomery. She doesn't seem like the kind of woman Tony would be attracted to. Why did you choose to match her with him?

Simple answer. Conflict. That's what you read for, isn't it? You don't want a story about a hero and heroine being nicey-nice to each other. That's a bore. And as an author, the easiest way to shake things up is to put two vastly different people on the page together and watch the fireworks.

But the thing is, when you have two people so incredibly mismatched, the challenge is to come up with a way to keep them together long enough for each of them to see the value in the other and ultimately to fall in love. In Tall Tales, it begins with the "oops" wedding in Vegas and goes from there.

Tall Tales and Wedding Veils is a fun romantic romp. One of your reviews for it compared it to a Jennifer Cruise book. Do you think romantic comedies are making a comeback in the market?

If they are, it's not nearly fast enough for me. Doesn't anybody want to LAUGH anymore?

Seriously, I'm not sure. There was a time in the late 1990s that romantic comedy was king. But these days, those of us who write comedy are getting nudged aside in favor of romantic suspense and paranormal authors. Why is the market saturated right now with dark and dangerous stories instead of light and fun ones? If anybody has an opinion, I'd love to hear it!

Since you were last in the Bandit Lair you've taken on a new PR project. Care to give us any hints about it?

Sure. My daughter and are are starting an online promotion business, part of which will include author promotion. We're making widgets.

Exactly what is a widget?

Our widgets are small, portable, multimedia presentations packed with information that can be picked up and put anywhere on the web. Because a widget streams from a single source to multiple sites (like a television signal streams from a single source to multiple sites) it means a widget isn't stuck at one web address. Instead, it can be in hundreds or even thousands of places at once.

And here's the good part. With only a few clicks, anyone can add an author's widget to their website, blog, or social networking site, or email it to anyone they choose, which gives a widget the kind of viral capacity authors have only dreamed of up to now. Click "get or share" on my Tall Tales widgets below and email it to a friend to see just how easy it is to share:

http://www.clearspring.com/widgets/480371302b3669c0

And be sure to keep an eye on those widgets. They're alive! If you're a reader who has embedded one of our author's widgets, whenever they have a new book out or the content of the widget changes in any way, your copy of the widget changes, too, and you don't have to do a thing.

As cool as they are, widgets are only a part of what we have planned for author promotion. If you're an author and you want to get in on the ground floor of the hottest trend ever in Internet marketing and drastically increase your presence on the web, send me an email at jane@janegraves.com and we'll let you know when we're open for business.

Another project you've been involved in for the past three years is the annual Richardson, Texas "Buns And Roses Tea". This is your second year as Chair for the tea. Can you fill our readers in on details for this year's tea and what the proceeds support?

Buns & Roses is back, bigger and better than ever! We're thrilled that Sherrilyn Kenyon is joining us as keynote speaker, as well as thirty three fabulous romance authors as table hosts.

Widgets aren't just for author promotion. They're for event promotion, too, or for anything else you need to get the word out about! Click on the image to check out one we just launched that tells you everything you need to know about Buns & Roses.

Thanks so much for inviting me into the Lair. As always, it's been a blast!

So, what about you guys, any of you ever done something spontaneous, like Tony and Heather, you either loved or regretted later?

Jane is giving away a signed copy of Tall Tales And Wedding Veils to one lucky commenter.