Hi everyone,

The birthday celebrations continue! If you missed the first post, check it out here. If not, please read on…

My Inspiration for Stately Pleasures

Although I don’t remember where the actual idea for Stately Pleasures came from, as it’s was in my head for so long before I wrote it, I can definitely tell you where my inspirations came from. Inspirations for setting and characters, that is.

The setting, Davenport Manor, is a totally fictional place made up of various real places I’ve been to and ones I imagined. It’s like a patchwork quilt, or something. A facade from here, a maze from there, a schoolroom from X, servants’ quarters from Y, a library from Z… you get the idea. It all pieced together nicely in my mind to make up a very rich and exciting place for my characters to play. I loved writing about the setting just as much as what was actually happening there!

As for character inspirations, well, that’s easy. Imagine Jeremy Renner with a posh British accent and you have Jeremy Davenport. Imagine Jared Padalecki, also with a posh British accent, and you have Ethan Hayes. Told you it was easy 😉

Alice Brown is much more difficult. She’s a curvy chick, and I looked around and couldn’t find a Rubenesque celebrity I wanted to base her on. Sadly, there are also far too few Rubenesque celebrities around! So Alice is a total figment of my imagination, but if I got asked to select someone for casting in a film, I’d choose Melissa McCarthy.

Grab the book here. Add it to Goodreads here. Then scroll down to find out about the giveaway!

Happy Reading,

Lucy x

*****

WIN!

Win your choice of Kindle/tablet case, plus some awesome swag!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Be sure to stop by tomorrow for the next birthday post!

Hi everyone,

I’m very excited to be kicking off the birthday celebrations. No, it’s not my birthday, but the first birthday of the release of my first full-length novel, Stately Pleasures. My baby has been out in the world for a whole year! And what’s more, people have been buying it, and, according to reviews – enjoying it! Naturally, this makes for one utterly delighted author, so I thought it would be a great idea to have a bit of a shindig, including some cool prizes for you lovely lot. Over the next couple of weeks I’ll be sharing in depth information on the book for those of you that missed it first time around, and each post will give you more opportunities to enter the giveaway. So… here goes!

An Introduction to Stately Pleasures

For those of you that don’t know, Stately Pleasures was my debut novel. Well, sort of. I co-authored Grand Slam with Lily Harlem and that was published in August 2013, but this was my first solo novel. I actually wrote it before Lily and I wrote Grand Slam, but the madness that is the publishing world meant that it was published a few months later than the aforementioned book.

It’s a book that had been floating around in the back of my mind for quite some time before I wrote it. Admittedly, it took me a long time to make the jump from short stories to novellas, then from novellas to novels. I suspect fear and confidence had a lot to do with it, but once I started, I really enjoyed the experience. I could explore the backgrounds and motivations of the characters and have a lot more fun with them than I could in shorter work.

Stately Pleasures is set in the fictional Davenport Manor in England. It’s actually an amalgamation of various different stately homes and gardens that I’ve been to, with tweaks and things made to suit my story. A bonus of writing fiction!

The lead character, Alice Brown, is a curvy chick with a very firm goal – she wants to manage a stately home. It’s been her goal all of her life and she’s worked hard to achieve it. In this book, she gets one step closer—by bagging an interview for a maternity contract at Davenport Manor. Once she’s had nine months experience at the job, she should be able to then make the move somewhere else on a permanent basis.

It’s not a spoiler to tell you that Alice gets the job, and she’s delighted. She jumps into the role with enthusiasm, but things aren’t all plain sailing—it wouldn’t be a very long book if they were, would it? 😉 Alice accidentally catches her boss, Jeremy Davenport, in a compromising position, and from there, things go totally crazy. It turns out the man she previously thought of as posh totty is actually a man with many kinks, and he’s not against using his position to get what he wants.

I’m not going to say any more, lest I do give away any spoilers, but let’s just say that Stately Pleasures is a BDSM ménage erotic romance and leave it at that. If you want to find out more… you know what to do 😉 and here’s a hint – if you’re a Kindle fan from Europe, I’d suggest grabbing your copy before 1st January 2015, as some really dull and boring law that I don’t really understand means that the prices of eBooks are going to increase, and it’s completely beyond author and publisher control.

Grab the book here. Add it to Goodreads here. Then scroll down to find out about the giveaway!

Happy Reading,

Lucy x

*****

WIN!

Win your choice of Kindle/tablet case, plus some awesome swag!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Be sure to stop by on the 15th for the next birthday post!