SMART BLONDES - REVIEW OF A FUN BOOK

Smart Blondes

by Sonia Koso

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MY REVIEW

In SMART BLONDES, Sonia Koso has created a fun read for women of any age. While her daughter is at summer camp, Carrie Pryce discovers her husband in an extremely compromising position in their kitchen with the nanny. She returns to her hometown lick her wounds, so to speak, and soon reconnects with her childhood friend Portia, now a lawyer. 

Carrie's mother-in-law has been the Pryce matriarch who controls the family. Carrie's mom, on the other hand, is a lovely, supportive woman who welcomes Carrie back. Her family friend, Deane, is like a second mother to Carrie and Portia. As Carrie recovers her self-esteem, she remembers why she loved her hometown. 

Carrie's flamboyant cousin Eric has also returned home and helps his dad manage their pharmacy. Business has tripled since he's been introducing boutique gift items in the store. Best of all, Eric has rented a part of his home to Rhett Richards, a hunky guy who makes women of all ages think un-ladylike thoughts. 

When Carrie's ex tries to pull a fast one, who comes to Carrie's rescue? Portia, Deane, and a cadre of blonde women who are far too smart for the Pryce family.

SMART BLONDES was a fun, fast-paced read. A few craft things slowed my reading, but that's what's wrong with being an author. We care about silly things like POV switches, and transitions, and so forth. For the normal reader, these are incidental. No matter which you are, you'll love this story of finding out what's important and who your true friends are. Dig into this book tonight and you won't be able to put it down until you've read the last line.

SMART BLONDES Blurb:

Austin socialite Carrie Pryce has no clue her criminally charming husband is carrying on with another woman until she returns home unexpectedly, mistakes the sounds of passion for a home-invasion robbery and accidentally shoots him in the backside. Stunned, Carrie drives all night to her quirky hometown and collapses in a near-catatonic state.

A crew of ladies spanning three generations realize it’s up to them to help Carrie get her life out of the ditch. Known as the “Presbyterian Mafia,” these are not sweet old gals. They have a book club that never reads, a garden club that doesn’t garden, and a bible study class that gossips about the Methodists. They’re known around town for antics including catfights, car chases and Voodoo rituals. The women enlist Carrie’s former childhood best friend Portia (now a lawyer) and her flamboyant cousin Eric (recently returned from New York) in their effort. 

While dealing with the after-effects of her imprudent gunplay and managing a hair color disaster, Carrie meets Rhett Richards. He’s an attractive oil field worker who can make women think un-Christian thoughts by the mere act of wearing a pair of tight wranglers. Carrie soon learns that hometowns can be the perfect places to bury old scandals and create new ones.

SMART BLONDES Excerpt: His cheating heart and other parts

“Baby, put the gun down,” Jake said in a tone of voice one would use with a naughty three year old. “It’s…it’s not what you think.”

Carrie froze. She couldn’t have lowered her arms if she tried. As she scanned the room, she saw the remnants of a well-planned romantic event including champagne, massage oil, and discarded lingerie.

Jake was slowly moving away from the defiled kitchen island and found a potholder to shield his now deflating manhood.

“I wanted to tell you for a while,” Jake started. “I hate that you had to find out about it this way.” Carrie recognized this as his salesman tone of voice—over-articulated, round tones that were completely full of shit.

“This has been going on for a while?” Carrie asked.  Jake looked down and then nodded his head.

He exhaled slowly and gazed downward, his default action before saying something awful. “We’ve been having problems...I’ve tried, but the excitement is gone.”

Excitement? Carrie immediately knew this was man code for I want to trade you in for a new one.  She’d seen it many times but never thought it would happen to her. The phrase I’ve tried but the excitement is gone would run through her head in a relentless loop a thousand times.

“I need to be on my own for a while,” Jake continued in round tones. “With you and Kayley around, I can’t figure any of this out.  I can’t be a grown man. I need fewer responsibilities…”

“You want me and Kayley to leave so you can figure out how to be a grown man? Jesus H. Christ!” Carrie screamed it more than speaking it. She couldn’t help herself.

“Maybe you need to get a few things,” Jake began, “And I’ll call the Driskill Hotel and get you a suite. We’ll talk in a day or two after we both cool down.”

“Let me get this straight. I walk in on you with your cock in the help… and you think I need to leave?” She firmed up her grip on the tiny Kel-Tec pistol. “I’m not leaving this house, this room or even that damn Aga!” It was an out-of-body experience. She wasn’t sure why she did it but Carrie fired the pistol at the stove.

 There was bang followed by a ping and a whoosh and Jake’s scream.  The bullet hit the front of the Aga, ricocheted off the cast iron and bounced into Jake’s naked butt cheek.

The next few seconds seemed like a year. Jake’s hand went to his ass then up to his face where he saw blood.

“Holy shit, Carrie!”

Avatar for Sonia Koso

AUTHOR Bio and Links:

Sonia Koso grew up in the eccentricity-filled piney woods of North East Texas.  She has been writing since an early age and considers it her first love. After receiving a B.A. in English Writing, her life took a drastic turn and she went to law school. Sonia practiced law for over a decade but was drawn back to writing in 2012. Sonia's stories feature strong women, good-looking guys, legal dilemmas and a dose of humor.  Smart Blondes borrows many characters from her childhood as well as her legal career.

Sonia does most of her writing at her condo in Austin’s hip SOCO district. It’s in walking distance from landmarks including Lady Bird Lake, the Continental Club, and the Congress Avenue Bat Bridge. When not writing, Sonia divides her time between the live music of Austin and the sunshine of Boca Raton. She loves Tex-Mex food, blue water, cocktails and good friends. Sonia often dreams of a man who can do his own laundry and a walk-in closet with a chandelier…but not necessarily in that order. 

Links:

 www.soniakoso.com

 www.facebook.com/sonia.koso

www.pinterest.com/soniakoso

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HOW SMALL TOWN LIVING MADE ME A BETTER WRITER

By Eric Trant

So I don't mean to imply that being from the city or some other place besides a small town somehow makes you less of a writer. That is not my intent, so please do not take it that way. I am simply saying that in my case, for my style of writing, having a repertoire of small town experiences is a great tool in my bag.

I want you as a writer to extrapolate what I say here to your own case and your own style. Look in your bag and see what about your history and your genre and your technique can be blamed on your upbringing. In my case, the formative years were the seventies and eighties. My first twelve years were spent in East Texas, so far East that if you went any farther you'd be in Louisiana, on a ranch surrounded by the East Texas Piney Woods. I was baptized in a church in the woods down a dirt road. I slopped hogs and dropped off the fence and held their ears and rode them until they rolled me in the mud. I fell off horses and got chased by the bulls and saw calves fall out of their mothers. I had cow-patty fights, and can tell you one-day horse pellets and three-day crusted cow-patties green on the inside are the best ammunition for that sort of fight. I can also tell you that plywood shields are no protection at all. I know what a creek sounds like at midnight, how the woods talk to you if you listen, and what a truly dark sky looks like on a clear night.

I spent my teens on the Gulf Coast outside of Houston. I was an in-towner by then, not one of those other types, the ones who live outside of town. I understand that stratification even between people who all consider themselves small-town. I remember getting in trouble in high school for carrying a double-edged boot dagger in my truck. It was one of my hunting knives. The principal confiscated it and gave it to me after school and said it was a nice knife, that if I left it out like that somebody would steal it. So I put it with my machete and the axe behind the seat. I remember guys showing off their pistols and rifles and shotguns at lunch. I remember showing off that knife and throwing it around at band practice with some other guy's lock-blade.

Then there was this ice-water culture-shock when I went to college at the University of Texas at Austin. A cop confiscated that boot dagger and she took it home instead of back to the precinct. I checked and they all laughed at me for checking and waved me out of the precinct and I never saw it again. My brother gave me that knife for my tenth birthday, a bone-handed Ka-Bar from the local feed store with a thick leather sheath, one of those knives you could get so sharp it almost hurt to look at it and it had never left my side. I left my machete and axe and rope and all that other stuff in my apartment after that, and after a while I don't know what happened to it all. It walked off I guess.

I ordered pizza for the first time. I heard sirens like you hear in the movies. I found out it was true you could order Chinese if you pick it up, and it really did come in those little boxes with chopsticks. I rode in a cab. I never knew how much they reeked. Same with the public buses. I used a cross-walk thingie and tried sushi and found out I really liked sushi.

The point of all this is that my story gives me quite a lot of fodder for writing. I can share these experiences with others and maybe find some sort of common thread, and by recounting and rethinking the events of my life, I can dredge up scenes, scenarios, situations, characters, growth and wisdom and insight. We can all do that with our life's story, if we just look at it and say, Being me makes me a more interesting writer.

What about you makes you a more interesting writer?

Eric will be giving away a copy of his thriller WINK to one lucky commenter. Please leave your email in your comment.

Summary for WINK: A moving, fast-paced and incredibly emotional story about love, friendship and transformation.

In this thriller set in a rural Gulf Coast town, Marty Jameson finds refuge in the attic from his mother's abusive rages. But only during the day. At night the attic holds terrors even beyond what he witnesses in his home. With a family made up of a psychotic mother, a drug-dealing father and a comatose older brother withering away in the spare bedroom, Marty feels trapped.

Next door, wheel-chair bound Sadie Marsh obsessively watches Marty's comings and goings from her bedroom window, despite her mother's warning about the evil in that house. Evil which appears to Sadie as huge black-winged creatures.

Marty, emotionally torn by the violence and dysfunction in his family, is drawn to Sadie and her kindly mother. But if he is to save his new friend from the supernatural horror threatening them all, Marty must transform himself from victim to hero. And to do so, he must first confront what lurks hidden in the shadows of his attic.

WINK is a thriller that captivates readers and leaves them longing for more. Trant is a talented author whose character descriptions go far beyond the physical. 

http://www.amazon.com/Wink-ebook/dp/B00CE4OP1K/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1374539519&sr=1-1&keywords=Eric+Trant

Paperback: 275 pages

Publisher: WiDo Publishing (April 16, 2013)

ASIN: B00CE4OP1K

Twitter hashtag: #WINK

WINK is available as a print and e- book at Amazon and Barnes & Noble. 

Author Eric Trant

Eric W. Trant is a published author of several short stories and the novels OUT OF THE GREAT BLACK NOTHING and WINK from WiDo Publishing, out now! See more of Eric's work on his blog: http://diggingwiththeworms.blogspot.com/, order directly from Amazon, or wherever books are sold.

Eric is an advocate for organ donation and lost his 18 mo son in May of 2012. Eric and his wife courageously donated their son’s heart, kidneys, and liver. The couple went on to begin  a foundation to support organ donor families. Eric speaks openly about this emotional journey on his blog and the topic of organ donation is very close to his heart.

Find out more about the author by visiting him online:

Author website: www.EricTrant.com

Author blog: http://diggingwiththeworms.blogspot.com/

Author Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/eric.trant.9

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GUEST TESSA GRAY SHARES HER TEXAS DREAM CATCHER SERIES

Author Tessa Gray

            I grew up in the foster care system, so I had several different homes, but when the dust settled, I ended up living in Osseo, Minnesota, a small town near Minneapolis. As a child, I wasn’t a particularly avid reader, but in elementary school, I loved a series of books about the adventures of three Swedish triplets: “Flicka, Ricka, and Dicka” (I kid you not!) Another series I enjoyed was the Trixie Belden adventures; I even had Trixie Belden paper dolls and spent hours playing with them, making up more stories.

            The genre I love best is women’s fiction because the characters are multi-dimensional with real-life experiences. My favorite authors are Kristin Hannah, Anita Shreve, Nicholas Sparks, Susan Elizabeth Phillips, and Debbie Macomber. When I’m not writing, I love to spend time quilting. It’s a fairly new hobby for me, and I find it therapeutic. I’ve been a singer all my life, so I’m always finding myself a gig. I always tell friends, “I’ve never met a microphone I didn’t like.” It’s true…I love entertaining very much. During my early years, singing sustained me. As a life-long educator I realize that every child needs something they excel at, and for me it was music.

            I have a favorite quote that most people are probably familiar with: “An unexamined life is not worth living.” While there’s a great deal of debate as to who said it (Socrates or Thoreau), it remains a staple for me. I teach college students to write argument essays and in preparing them, I insist they constantly reexamine their values systems and explore other people’s ideas. In doing so, we learn a great deal about ourselves. I practice what I preach and incorporate this motto into my own writing, and it helps me create better,  more believable characters that often undergo a complete metamorphosis as the book comes to an end.

            Although I always made up stories in my head as a child (inventing that perfect family I never had!) I didn’t begin seriously pursuing writing until 2004. I generally sit in my family room, staring out into our pasture, watching our goats and miniature donkeys as I write on a laptop. Music, of course, is required, and my taste fluctuates between Celtic, Classical, and Country. Since I’m writing the Dream Catchers series set in the small, West Texas town of Alpine, country music is what I most often listen to know: George Strait, in particular.

            I’m probably not your typical writer because I spend at least a month “thinking” out my storyline and characters before writing a single word. After I’ve thought out the book, I grab my trusty storyboard and get to work. I plan the turning points, black moment, etc. When I’m finished with that, I use different colored sticky notes to plot out every single scene. By the time I begin the book, it’s completely planned out. It changes along the way, of course, but the skeleton of the novel is in place. That’s the teacher in me; I simply can’t help myself!

Cemetery Inspiration

            I must confess that the people and events in my novels are based on often based on real life. Several years ago a recently divorced acquaintance made a trip back to where she was raised and went to pay her respects to a relative buried in a small, Texas cemetery. Coincidentally, a classmate of hers happened to be there, paying his respects to his deceased wife. The two reconnected and they ended up getting married. That image stuck in my mind, and when I wrote LAST CHANCE TEXAS years later, I knew from the beginning of the novel that the couple would meet in a cemetery. Nathan Wainwright is a widower, paying his respects to his wife; Kelsey Malone is an out-of-towner who pays her respect to a distant aunt. When some girlfriends and I took a road trip to the tiny, West Texas town of Alpine, the first stop I made was at the Alpine Angel’s Cemetery. That became the first scene in the book.

            I don’t write every single day and make no apologies. For me, I need a break from writing and that’s often when I either quilt or do some singing. I think life is all about balance and in the end, if you pursue other things and don’t ‘put all your eggs in one basket’, you’ll be a better writer.

            The most important job of writers (in my opinion) is to bring real, true-life characters with enormous depth. The third book of the Dream Catcher series features Jake Crenshaw. Jake’s a washed up rodeo rider who tends bar. He’s not well educated and relies on his enormously good looks to get him the girl. I suspect some readers will be taken back by the fact he’s blue collar, but in the real world, not everyone has a college education. I think it’s so important to write about real people. My books stress hope and change; I know this sounds like a political commercial, but it’s true. People can change at any age; that’s so important!

            My long term plan is to continue teaching and writing. I can’t imagine a time when I won’t enjoy helping young writers find their own, authentic voice. What could possibly be more fulfilling? I do have several things on my “bucket” list. One of those includes taking a line dancing class at a nearby community center. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do and I can’t wait to start! Next summer I’m flying to Ireland with friends to go back to my roots. My ancestors came to America during the Potato Famine of the 1840’s, and I’ve always been curious about what that part of the world is like. I’d be lying if I didn’t say the Irish pubs and whiskey tours weren’t an additional draw!

            In addition to finishing up my Dream Catchers series, I’ll be working on four novellas  set  in a fictitious Minnesota town called Crescent Falls. Each novella features one of four sisters (the Hanlon girls) who are forced to deal with their father’s diagnosis of Alzheimer’s. Like all siblings, each one reacts differently to tragedy, using completely different coping mechanisms to survive. Sarah’s story begins in December of 2013, and the other siblings (Maggie, Clare, and Chloe’s will follow in March of 2014, June of 2014, and September of 2014, respectively.)

            The best advice I can give any writer is to write for the love of it. If you want to quit after receiving rejections, you’re really not a writer. I think of writing as fulfilling a mission; giving readers your own, unique message that no one else can give them. It’s an awesome responsibility.

            I’ve been asked to give an interesting fact about myself, so here it is. I’ve sung the national anthem at a Texas Rangers game. In 2003, my women’s quartet, “Forward Motion” was honored to perform and we did well! As I looked up at the huge screen and watched all of us sing that marvelous song, I thought that I was the luckiest person in the world to be able to perform in front of over 17,000 people and have the time of my life! I’ve also been asked about something that would surprise readers about me. This past year I joined the world of Twitter.  Vice President Joe Biden asked people to tweet a question about gun safety, and I responded, as did thousands of others. My question was selected as one Mr. Biden would address at a town hall meeting on February 19, 2013. It was amazing to hear him spend five minutes on my question. I almost felt famous!

            Before ending this discussion, I’d love to present readers with an excerpt from the second in the Dream Catchers series STARS OVER TEXAS which has a September 15^th, 2013 release date:

Prologue

Just put a gun to my head, Blake, and let’s get this over with. I’d rather die than stay married to you.

Meredith Chapman’s stomach pitched violently as she readjusted her seatbelt, preparing for take-of. Her husband of fifteen years sat next to her, his shoulders stooped, head slumped over as he pounded out another text message. Aware he’d probably blow her off, she made one last attempt to get him off the phone. “The plane’s about to take off, Blake. Please turn it off.”  

Blake shot her an angry glare, his piercing blue eyes sending chills through her. “I’m almost done. Quit nagging, will you?”

“Sir, all electronic devices must be turned off.” The meticulously dressed flight attendant leaned over, hands on her hips, and glared at him as she spoke.

As several nearby passengers watched the drama unfold, Meredith smiled weakly; just as she always did when apologizing and trying to run interference for a husband she’d fallen out of love with years ago. 

The attendant’s voice grew louder as she implored him to comply. “Sir, I’m telling you one last time. Turn off your cell phone.”

“Blake, please---“

“Oh, all right.” Slamming it shut, he sank down in his seat, looking like a small child who’d been reprimanded. Without warning he grabbed Meredith’s arm, wrapping his fingers around it so tightly she nearly blacked out. “If you ever embarrass me like that again they’ll be hell to pay.”

And that was the last thing she remembered.

The amazon link to LAST CHANCE TEXAS is:

http://www.amazon.com/LAST-CHANCE-TEXAS-Dreamcatcher-ebook/dp/B00AOW1QJS/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1372783919&sr=1-2&key:words=LAST+CHANCE+TEXAS

The amazon link to TEXAS SUNSET is:

http://www.amazon.com/Texas-Sunset-Fiction-Tessa-Gray/dp/0988737922/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1372784123&sr=8-1&keywords=Texas+Sunset+by+Tessa+Gray

Both books are also available in print, as well as e-book versions.

TesssaGrayBooks (Twitter)

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www.tessagray.com (website)

Thanks to Tessa for visiting us today

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