Wednesday, November 11, 2015

Featured Author: Lynnette Austin

Welcome Today's Featured Author 
Lynnette Austin!!!!


The Best Laid Wedding Plans (Magnolia Brides #1)

by

With love in their hearts and crafting the perfect wedding on their minds, the possibilities are endless for the ladies of Lynette Austin's new Magnolia Brides series.

SOME DREAMS ARE WORTH WHATEVER IT TAKES

Jenni Beth Beaumont left her broken heart behind when she took her dream job in Savannah. But after her brother's death, Jenni Beth returns home to help mend her parents' hearts as well as restore their beautiful but crumbling antebellum mansion. New dreams take shape as Jenni Beth sets to work replacing floors and fixing pipes to convert the family homestead into the perfect wedding destination. However, some folks in their small Southern town are determined to see her fail.

Cole Bryson was once the love of Jenni Beth's life, but the charming architectural salvager has plans of his own for the Beaumont family home. As the two butt heads, old turmoil is brought to the surface and Cole and Jenni Beth will have to work through some painful memories and tough realities before they can set their pasts aside and have a second chance at their own happily ever after.




About Lynnette Austin:

The luxury of staying home when the weather turns nasty, of working in PJs and bare feet, and the fact that daydreaming is not only permissible but encouraged, are a few of the reasons middle school teacher Lynnette Austin gave up the classroom to write full-time. Lynnette grew up in Pennsylvania’s Alleghany Mountains, moved to Upstate New York, then to the Rockies in Wyoming. Presently she and her husband divide their time between Southwest Florida’s beaches and Georgia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. A finalist in RWA's Golden Heart Contest, PASIC's Book of Your Heart Contest, and Georgia Romance Writers' Maggie Contest, she’s published five books as Lynnette Hallberg. Having grown up in a small town, that’s where her heart takes her—to those quirky small towns where everybody knows everybody...and all their business, for better or worse.


 
Author Media Links

Interview With Lynnette Austin:
 
Thanks so much for having me here today! I’m really looking forward to our visit!
1. Can you tell us a little about your books?
I write romance, relationship books. To me, it’s all about that connection between people...and I want happy-ever-afters! But that doesn’t mean my characters, the people who live in my head, have an easy time of it. I love to put them through the wringer.

Take a falling-down-around-the-ears antebellum home, add one event planner, one landscape artist who’s a whiz with flower arrangements, and one tea shop owner with a knack for creating fantasy wedding cakes. The perfect ingredients for destination: wedding. But will they find their own happily-ever-after?

Reunited lovers, a crumbling antebellum home, and a big dream! This is The Best Laid Wedding Plans, the first in my new Magnolia Brides series.

Georgia’s Low Country. Soft, summer nights, sweet tea sippin’ on back porches, fireflies twinklin’, and those Southern men with their slow drawls and even slower hands. Add in some romantic weddings beneath live oaks dripping with Spanish moss, and what could be better?We all make plans, don’t we? And then we adjust and adjust again. That’s life. It’s Jenni Beth Beaumont’s, too. She had her dream job in Savannah. Until her brother died. Until she realized how badly her parents were handling it—and that the entire town of Misty Bottoms, Georgia, like so many other small Southern towns, was dying.
So she adjusts. She decides to turn her family home into a wedding destination, hoping to help her parents, save Magnolia House, and bring new jobs to the area in one fell swoop. Then Cole Bryson shows up—and Jenni Beth’s life turns upside-down. Again!
My previous series, Maverick Junction, takes place in small-town Texas.ight-fitting, well-worn jeans and a Stetson tipped low. Cowboy boots, dusty from riding the range and a day’s stubble shadowing a strong chin. The question begs to be asked. Is there anything sexier than a cowboy? They love their mamas, say yes, ma’am, and make our hearts pound and our palms sweat. It’s so much fun watching these big, strong cowboys fall in love!
Meet Cash and Annelise in Somebody Like You, the first in the series, followed by Ty and Sophie’s story in Nearest Thing to Heaven, and Brawley and Maggie’s in Can't Stop Lovin' You.
2. Which book has been your favorite to write?
Oh, that’s a little like trying to decide which child is your favorite. I think the answer, though, is the book I’m working on now—whichever one that happens to be. I tend to fall in love with both my hero and my heroine. Over the course of planning and writing a book, I spend a lot of time with these two, and they become breathing, living people to me, as I hope they will to my readers.
Cole Bryson, so sexy, so kind and helpful, so take-charge—and he desperately wants to help Jenni Beth—who does not want his help! Jenni Beth is my favorite kind of heroine—strong and independent. Both she and Cole can stand by themselves when they need to but are both so much stronger when they’re together as a couple. I like humor. I like my heroine sassy and my hero to have a little swagger. And he has to give great hugs! Cole most definitely does!
3. Where do you get your ideas?
On the way to Ft. Lauderdale, I stopped at a rest area. While I had my head down programming my GPS, my car door (which, stupid me, wasn’t locked) flew open and a man slid onto the passenger seat. I was out of my car in a flash, screaming my head off. Fortunately for me, the story has a happy ending. The intruder had mistaken my car for his friend’s and all was well. But as I drove away, rather shakily I admit, I started thinking...what if. And another story idea was born.
Ideas are everywhere. Sometimes they come in dreams. I’ll wake up with a story full-blown in my mind. They come so fast that the biggest problem is weeding them out. It’s a matter of deciding which one I want to write. If only there was more time...
4. What do you do when you’re not writing?
Sweep up the dust bunnies that have gathered while I’ve spent time with Jenni Beth and Cole! No, seriously, I love to read. I love to put the top down on my ‘Vette (Yes, Jenni Beth and I both have one!), crank up the music (country!), and take long rides.
5. Do you have a favorite spot to write?
I honestly believe that whether the answer is Starbucks, an office, or a spot at the dining room table, it’s important to have a designated writing space and to train yourself to write when you go there. I’m lucky to have an office—in both my Georgia and my Florida home. And when I sit my butt in the chair in either one, I write. There’s no waiting for a muse, no waiting for inspiration to strike. I open the door, invite my characters in, and we get to work!
6. If you could spend 24 hours as a fictional character, who would you choose?
I’d like to be Iris Simpkins, Kate Winslet’s character in The Holiday! I know, I know! She spends part of the film totally heartbroken. But…she’s so compassionate and intelligent. Everything and everyone around Iris is better because of her. She has this incredible positivity and lives in the moment. Her zest for life is enviable. And I love, love, love her relationship with Arthur Abbott, her elderly neighbor. If you haven’t seen this movie, you are in for such a treat!
7. Do you work with an outline, or just write?
I’m a plotter who likes to take detours. Scenes come to me out-of-order when I’m planning a new book. I write them all down, and then try to whip them into some sort of logical plot which I set out on a white board, breaking the scenes into chapters. I even keep notebooks for each book, divided into sections. But if something unplanned or unsuspected pops up, I take advantage of it. I don’t dismiss a plot point or a character simply because it’s not on my white board. I sit down and refigure the story with this new twist. After all, aren’t so many of life’s best moments the unplanned ones?
8. What’s one random fact about yourself that you can share?
A student brought me a bouquet of rather wilted flowers one day. It turned out he’d taken a shortcut through the cemetery that morning. The thought was there, right?
9. What are you working on next?
Oh, I’m so glad you asked! The Best Laid Wedding Plans is the first in my Magnolia Brides series. The second, Every Bride Has Her Day, will be out May, 2016. New York City Detective Sam DeLuca has charged into more than his share of dark alleys, but none threaten his peace of mind more than small-town Misty Bottoms’ feisty florist, Cricket O’Malley. Sparks fly in this story of city meets country. The third book in the series, tentatively titled Picture Perfect Wedding, releases September, 2016. Single mom Tansy Calhoun Forbes is returning home to Misty Bottoms in Georgia’s Low Country to start a new life and a new business, baking wedding cakes for Magnolia House’s brides and grooms. The only fly in the ointment? Beck Elliot, her former fiancé and the only man she’s ever loved, the man she betrayed.
After that? I’m hoping to stay in Misty Bottoms with stories about the Wylder brothers who are moving to town to expand their vintage car and motorcycles restoration business.

I’ve had such a wonderful time today! Thanks again for inviting me!

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