Louisa George: Trust Me, I'm a Doctor

 

I first discovered Louisa George's writing when her first ModernTempted novel was published back in October.  The wonderful mini-series tells the stories of Sasha and Cassie respectively and immediately I hit her back catalogue.  Delving into the world of Medical Romances has been often surprising and always entertaining; here Louisa argues the case for the Medicals...

Regular visitors to Chick Lit Aficionado will know that I write contemporary romance for Mills and Boon for the Modern Tempted™ line, but I’m not sure how many of know I also write for the Mills and Boon Medical Romance™ too.

Considering the huge following of programmes such as ER, Grey’s Anatomy, House, Doc Martin etc I’m surprised it isn’t the most popular romance genre, …but, it seems, a lot of readers aren’t even aware that medical romance exists!

I am here to change all that!

Medical romance books promise stories that are heartwarming and emotional, dynamic and dramatic featuring heroes with an empathy gene but who still retain a large dose of alpha or beta. They aren’t all doctors- we have paramedics, fire fighters, princes and male nurses. Our heroines are feisty and every bit the hero’s equal, if not always in job status then in intelligence and humour and capability. Our heroines are midwives, doctors, nurses, vets, pharmacists…anywhere that you’ll find someone saving lives you’ll come across a hero or heroine worthy of that status.  

Settings are very diverse too, to suit anyone’s tastes- we have large urban hospitals, small town cottage hospitals, GP practices, flying doctors, the outback, aid camps in Africa and even one book set in the White House featuring the doctor to the US president.

Settings provide familiarity and excitement; we have authors who love to write medical scenes (but keep the gore and jargon to a minimum), some who are classed as ‘medical light’ (medical detail is limited)…but all of them feature the romance first and foremost, the journey towards falling in love is always paramount! (As a note- we also have closed door, ‘sweet’ medical stories and some uber sexy ones too- depending on reader’s preferences).

We have stand-alone stories and continuities that feature eight books, all with a different couple highlighted in each- similar to all the well loved TV series. Once read, you’ll be hooked on this subgenre.

Currently I have a release in stores now, or available online. The Shameless Maverick is part of a series called 200 HarleyStreet, which is based in and around London. Hero Declan is an Irish Burns Specialist living in London to escape from his interfering sisters. Heroine Kara is an Aussie junior doctor escaping from her past. The story takes place in and around London and over to the beautiful Dublin countryside. It is book 7 of the 200 Harley Street series, but is easily read as a stand alone book. Here’s the blurb from the back cover:

Junior surgeon Kara Stephens has been assigned her first high-profile case. Great news- if she wasn’t working with hot-shot Irish surgeon Declan Underwood, the man she kissed at the hospital ball!

Declan may be the best reconstructive surgeon around, but his life in London is a far cry from his poverty stricken childhood. Kara’s about to discover that there’s more to her maverick than meets the eye.

So, what are you waiting for? Give medical romance a shot? If you’re interested in trying one, leave a comment and I’ll send one commenter a free book! Any questions about medical romance?

Having tried a variety of careers in retail, marketing and nursing (where a scratchy starched uniform was mandatory), Louisa George now thrilled that her dream job of writing for Harlequin Mills and Boon means she gets to go to work in her pyjamas! She writes fun sizzling contemporary stories for Harlequin KISS and emotionally charged stories for Mills and Boon Medical Romance. 
Louisa's Website 

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Matt Gardner: On Sex & Death

So I am incredibly blessed to have wonderful friends.  Take, for example, Matt Gardner, one of the first ever Mills & Boon boys, who took to the role with such aplomb, has written a book.  It's dark, it's funny and it's all about sex and death.  Downloadable for free from Amazon in the UK, US, Australia, and I'm sure elsewhere too...

On hearing that its free this weekend, I immediately hijacked him and asked for a guestpost!  Despite the fact that he has just moved halfway across the country, and is currently finishing the final draft of his first novel, he agreed...

I didn’t set out to write a collection of dark, twisted tales. When I launched my blog Interstellar Lovechild, I knew that I wanted to try my hand at some form of regular creative writing, and flash fiction seemed the best way forward – a new story every week, somewhere between 250-1000 words. I didn’t mean to make the majority of them dramatic little vignettes that went behind the closed doors of the protagonists’ lives, and reflected upon their most intimate and vulnerable moments.

It just sort of happened that way.

Mind you, I’m very glad that it did. Sex is fascinating – the politics and power and passion, the love and lust and longing. I’ve posited in the past that it’s like religion in many ways – we all have different takes on it, place varying degrees of importance on it. Terrible and wonderful things are done in its name or the pursuit of it. Both have sex and religion have the capacity to make us contemplate our own mortality, and the word ‘god’ is bandied about in both.

In Sex & Death, I wanted to treat the subject as something fairly matter of fact. It’s about sex rather than love, and though there are one or two stories that could be considered romantic from a certain perspective, and one or two that might be considered to deal with the more extreme side of things, I didn’t want to sensationalise or over-exaggerate. 

So it is that although there are a few stories that deal directly with the act of sex, it’s all of the emotions before and after that I’m rather more interested in. So we have the pressure beforehand that comes to the fore in the unfortunate tale of erectile dysfunction in Under Bright Lights. The jealousy and self-doubt in the uncomfortable thought of someone else doing what you’ve been doing in the Facebook-induced paranoia of I Don’t Care or the in-the-act anxiety of Embers. The hollow emptiness of a tryst stolen with a stranger in a hotel room or club toilet in No Strings Attached and 21^st Century Love.

The point is that sex is used as a catalyst to push our most primal buttons, and that’s what happens in a good number of these narrative vignettes. There are comic moments amongst these tales, sure, but for the most part, the drama is as messy as the act itself. Whatever your gender, whatever your sexuality, the emotions, the hopes, the fears, the joy, the despair, it’s often all the same. Sex is intense, so often a crucible of heightened passions, and that makes it a wonderful subject for character studies and narratives that are perhaps a little more about people than plots.

The reactions to Sex & Death have been encouraging to say the least. It was never going to sell by the millions – a genre-agnostic collection of flash fiction being self-published by a new, unknown writer doesn’t exactly scream bestseller – but it’s been a great way of getting people interacting with my writing, and I hope that the 5-day free period will serve to aid that.

Sex & Death will be free on the Kindle Store through to the end of the week. You can bag yourself 30 striking pieces of microfiction here.

An Interview with Victoria Fox

Victoria Fox is best known for her glamorous, Hollywood novels; full of scandal, seduction and mystery.  When I first read Power Games ahead of my monthly #ThrillsandSwoon blog, I was blown away and knew that I had to interview her!  Luckily for me, she was utterly lovely and more than happy to answer my questions...

1)  You’re known for your bonkbuster-style novels, and are often quoted as an admirer of Jackie Collins and Jilly Cooper. What is it about those two authors that has inspired you most?

I was reading Jackie and Jilly when I was a teenager; I think any books you obsess over when you’re that age stay with you. At boarding school we thumbed through the rude bits after lights-out and whispered and giggled over them in our dorms – as well as superb stories, they were also fabulous sex-ed! Plenty about these authors inspire me: the incredible plotlines, the larger-than-life characterisation and the glittering, exotic locations, but most of all it’s the fact of a woman writing sex. 

Jackie especially is known for her ball-busting heroines, female players taking control in business and in the bedroom, and I love that. It’s empowering to write about women in this way. Early bonkbusters paved the way for authors like me. Jackie and Jilly were pioneers of the genre and showed me that liberated women who enjoy sex are just as smart and powerful as men: it’s not about being one or the other, it’s about being both.

2)  I absolutely loved your latest novel. Power Games examines the pressures put on those in the public’s spotlight, and then what happens when that is wrenched away from them. Each character adapts to their new situation in very different ways; did you know from the outset what was going to happen, or did that develop as you wrote?

Power Games is a book of two halves. Part One sets up the characters and their inter-connecting dramas, while Part Two drops them into a completely new situation and examines what is left. I knew where everybody was going to end up, but not always how that character was going to get there. In Part One we don’t see a lot of the cast together, so only when they collided did I get to see how the tensions and dynamics worked within the group. This threw up lots of surprises!

3)  There are two very different societal structures in Power Games, the glamour of celebrity and the more intimate island community; which do you think reflects true life best, or are they both magnified aspects of our society?

The island reflects true life best. I wrote Power Games because I’m fascinated by the disparity between modern living in all its chaotic extravagance and the basic, integral workings of human nature. What happens when the world we know is ripped away? Have we evolved, or are we unchanged? That these castaways are celebrities further amplifies the issue; they are used to even greater decoration than ordinary people. What is that decoration worth, when faced with life or death? 

The reality they come from is disturbed in its own way, but the jungle they enter is a new game entirely. They must come to grips with the fact that money and fame are worthless, as are the distractions they surround themselves with so that they don’t have to face what’s inside. On the island, impulses and urges break free. The rules go out the window.

4)  The novel has been given a glam cover with a ‘blinged-up’ heart on it; which seems in some ways at odds with its Lord of the Flies-esque content. Do you think that, as a woman writer, your books are marketed in a particular way?

I’m seriously flattered about the Lord of the Flies comparison! But at its (blinged-up) heart, Power Games is a glamorous, dangerous, red-hot sexy slice of women’s escapist fiction, and I think the cover reflects that perfectly. I agree that some covers on the market can appear watered down, so my publishers and I were firm that Power Games should be bold, striking and memorable.

5)  I’ve been referring to Power Games rather glibly on Twitter as #LordoftheFlieswithSex, but I genuinely feel that the sexual content adds an intensity to the narrative as a whole. How much of the sex in Part Two is base instinct, and how much is reminiscent of the romance of their previous lives?

Sex is the truest impulse of all. In the jungle, it comes to represent everything these characters have been suppressing or running from in their old lives. Without their former trappings, the mind and body are the only things left. Sex is the firmest expression of survival there is: the ultimate release, the ultimate emergence, and the ultimate reminder that they are still breathing. Relationships are carried through into Part Two but fresh desires also come to light, some of them more shocking than others.

6)  And finally, can you tell us about any projects that you’re currently working on?

I’m halfway through my next glam-fiction novel, out summer 2015. It’s the tale of two sisters torn apart by fate, and unfolds between Hollywood, Europe and Argentina.

Power Games is out on 4th July and can be found in bookstores and online.  For more information about Victoria Fox's other books and future projects, visit her website.