Welcome to Sugarbeat’s Books – The Home of the Romance Novel!
Today we are welcoming Carolyn Brown to the blog! She has been here before and we’re happy she’s come back for a visit. Especially since she brings these books with such yummy covers 🙂 She will be giving away 2 copies of Darn Good Cowboy Christmas to readers that fill out the form below! You have to have a US or Canadian mailing address for this giveaway because the giveaway is a paperback copy. If you missed my review from last week, make sure you see what I have to say about this book! Sit back and enjoy what Carolyn has to share with us!
Carolyn Brown Guest Blog, Author of Darn Good Cowboy Christmas
Howdy everyone! Thank you so much for inviting me back to your blog to talk about Darn Good Cowboy Christmas. It’s the third book in the Spikes & Spurs series and the second holiday book (Honky Tonk Christmas, 2010) I’ve written and was so much fun that there’s another one on the way in the fall of 2012!
Is everyone ready for Thanksgiving? Got the turkey thawing and the pecans shelled and chopped for pies? In Darn Good Cowboy Christmas Thanksgiving at Liz’s place in Ringgold, Texas came a few days early of the actual date and they celebrated Christmas that day instead of Thanksgiving. Her folks’ carnival had had its last gig of the year in Bowie and they were on their way home to the Texas panhandle for the winter when she had the big party for the whole crew.
She and Raylen, along with whoever else they could coerce into helping them, had spent days getting all the decorations up so that her farm would run the Griswold’s House some stiff competition! And then they spent more time finding just the right Christmas tree to set up in the barn for the party. And it had presents for everyone underneath it.
I thought of Liz and all her road trips with the carnival before she gave up her traveling wings and settled down in Ringgold, Texas when asked to write about my road trips for Darn Good Cowboy Christmas. Liz wanted roots so very badly but to get them she had to fold up her wings and put them away which was not an easy task. Thank goodness Raylen was a patient man and willing to help her set roots into the Texas soil before she had to completely forsake those wings.
And now to answer that question about road trips: yes, I’ve made many trips for this series and for this book. Ringgold, Texas has an estimated population of one hundred people and that’s gathering up the folks in outlying farms and ranches. The actual town is barely a spot on the map where Highway 82 and Highway 81 intersect. It doesn’t have a gas station or a grocery store but it does have a church, an elementary school and a lot of really nice friendly folks.
You’d think that I could make a trip down to that area one time, take half a dozen pictures and a paragraph of notes and bingo, it would be done, but it didn’t work that way. There isn’t a Chicken Fried Café or the beauty shop that Gemma owns right beside it in town but I had to figure out just where it was in the book in relation to Ace’s ranch and the O’Donnell’s horse ranch. Those were figured out in the first book in the series but Liz was new in the area so she had to know about those things. And I had to look at the whole area with her eyes, not mine that had already written two books (Love Drunk Cowboy in Terral, five miles over the border into Oklahoma and Red’s Hot Cowboy in Henrietta, a few miles west of Ringgold).
Traveling from Liz’s ranch to the café, the beauty shop and the O’Donnell Ranch and then across the Red River to Austin and Rye’s house was very exciting even though I’d made the trip several times for the first two books. Her excitement over everything put a new glow on the area and made it brand new for me and hopefully for the readers.
I’d been from Ringgold to Wichita Falls dozens of times but making the trip to Wichita Falls to buy Christmas decorations and presents and passing through Henrietta was another new experience since Liz had never been to those places before. She saw things that I’d missed before like the man selling home crafted furniture on the side of the road near Henrietta.
A road trip doesn’t mean just driving through the town, looking at the mesquite, the Longhorns and the armadillos. It means stopping at fruit stands, mom and pop stores and wherever else the trip takes us. I signed books in Terral, Oklahoma this past summer at their Watermelon Festival and have had lots of feed back from the folks who bought a book saying that I got the locale and the attitude of the people “right on”. One lady said that my characters reminded her of her in-laws. Another asked if I’d lived in the Ringgold area most of my life because it sure sounded like I knew everyone. That’s the result of merely going to the area and getting a feel for it.
Road trips are a must for me because a few years ago I found out just how important they are. I was writing a historical romance set just after the Oklahoma Land Rush and my characters were swimming in a creek up near Guthrie, Oklahoma. On a fluke we took a little road trip to that area and one look at that muddy, clay-banked creek let me know that my character would not have gotten into that water in her brand new white swim dress.
So it was with Liz. I chose her farm land, her house and her barn and went with her to talk to Jasmine about working at Chicken Fried and it took more than one trip across the Red River to get it all right. It really is an area where everyone knows everyone, where neighbors still care about each other, and folks in pickup trucks still wave when they pass whether they know you or not.
Tell me, do you like to read a book where it feels like you are right there, no matter if it is written about a town with a population of a hundred or a bustling big city like Dallas?
Darn Good Cowboy Christmas by Carolyn Brown—In Stores NOW!
He’s One Hot Cowboy
Raylen O’Donnell is one smokin’ hot cowboy. He could have any woman he wants, but he’s never been able to forget a certain dark-haired girl who disappeared from his life. So when she suddenly returns to the ranch nexct door, Raylen’s not fixing to let her get away again…
And She’s Out for a Sizzlin’ Christmas
Raised in a traveling carnival, Lizelle Hanson thought all she wanted was a house that didn’t have wheels and a sexy cowboy for her very own. But settling down’s going to take some getting used to, and cathing Raylen, the hotter-than-hell cowboy next door, might just take a little holiday magic…
About the Author
Carolyn Brown is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author with more than forty books published, and credits her eclectic family for her humor and writing ideas. She writes bestselling single title cowboy and country music mass market romances. Born in Texas and raised in southern Oklahoma, Carolyn and her husband now make their home in the town of Davis, Oklahoma, where she is working on her next book, One Hot Cowboy Wedding, which will be in stores in April 2012. For more information, please visit http://carolynlbrown.com/.
I’d like to thank Carolyn for stopping by and sharing about her story! Please drop by and see what I had to say about this story and if it sound like something you’d like, fill out the form and cross your fingers 🙂
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