Wednesday, July 31, 2019

Love and Other Mistakes Blog Tour + Interview with Author Jessica Kate

 

Welcome to the Blog Tour for Love and Other Mistakes by Jessica Kate, hosted by JustRead Publicity Tours!

 
Title: Love and Other Mistakes 
Author: Jessica Kate  
Publisher: Thomas Nelson 
Release Date: July 30, 2019 
Genre: Romantic Comedy

There’s a fine line between love and hate . . . And for the last seven years, Natalie Groves has hated Jeremy Walters.

Natalie Groves was meant for great things. But soon after her fiancé left, Natalie’s father was diagnosed with cancer. Suddenly her grand plans evaporated . . . and God felt very far away.

Fast-forward seven years, and an internship presents Natalie a chance at her destiny—but she needs a job to work around it. And the only offer available is worse than a life sentence. Her ex Jeremy, now back in town, is desperate for help with his infant son and troubled teenage niece, Lili. And Natalie may be just the one to help Jeremy . . . provided they don’t kill each other in the process.

When Jeremy and Natalie join forces, sparks fly. But will either of them get burned along the way?



 

Australian Jessica Kate is a sassy romance author and addict.

Her novels feature wit, snark and grit, and her StoryNerds podcast gives her a chance to nerd out with others about these ingredients in books, movies and TV.

She has a passion for garlic bread, theme parks and Batman.

Sign up to her newsletter at jessicakatewriting.com to hear first about her books, including her upcoming novels Love and Other Mistakes and A Girl’s Guide to the Outback.

The StoryNerds podcast is available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and at www.storynerds.podbean.com.

CONNECT WITH JESSICA: Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram





Hi Jessica! First of all, thank you so much for taking the time to answer my questions and allowing myself and my readers here at A Modern Day Fairy Tale the chance to get to know you and your book a bit better. Let’s start with something fun… tell us 5 random facts about yourself that we WON’T find in your bio!

Hi Randi! Okay, five facts:
-       My exercise of choice is boxing training. I don’t actually fight, but the training is super fun and I’m told I have a mean left hook!
-       I have patted a stingray (and it feels gross).
-       I grew up on dairy farms in rural Australia.
-       I’m the oldest of 25 grandkids and I did a lot of babysitting, so there’s a lot of themes around kids and families mixed into my rom coms!
-       Apart from romantic comedies, I LOVE time travel, alternate universes and character-driven sci fi. I love the X Files, Killjoys and I loved the alternate universe elements of The Flash.


Love and Other Mistakes is your debut romantic comedy, congrats! I can only imagine the excitement! Tell us about that experience: What was it like finding out it was to be published, seeing it in print for the first time, etc?  


I couldn’t believe it, and it’s still sinking in. Opening up the advanced copy of my book was super surreal. Somehow I was surprised to see that the words inside this ‘real’ book were ones I’d written!

Writing romantic comedy, I have to know: how many of your own romantic experiences make it into your novels? Any fun stories you’d care to share? 

LOL – nope! My love life hasn’t been quite as dramatic as my characters’ misadventures. I think the only thing from my love life was Natalie getting annoyed that real life wasn’t like an episode of Friends and in fact she didn’t have a date every Friday night!


On your website, you mention living with housemates as one of your favorite things. That seems like a writer’s dream! Do those experiences ever make it into your writing? And if so, how do your housemates feel about that? 

Weirdly it’s not my housemates that I constantly take notes on, but my workmates! I am constantly writing down funny stories they tell me from their lives into my phone for a future book. “This is going in a book” is basically my catchphrase at work. They all tell me they expect royalties. 😊



The term 'inspirational romance’ often brings up a certain stereotype that is far from the sass and humor we see in your writing. How has it been incorporating your own faith into your stories and still keeping them fun and unique? 


For me, it’s a very natural thing. Every lesson I learn in my life ties back to God somehow, so that happens for my characters too.

And as for the humor—I love things that are funny! We laugh at lot in my family and at my workplace, and I watch, read and study comedic storytelling. It’s hard to imagine writing anything else. Even if I went into another genre—and finally wrote that alternate universe novel I’m always talking about—it’d have romance, comedy and faith in it as well.

Part of it probably ties back to my obsession with TV and movies. Comedy is so much more common there, and rom com elements have worked their way into all different genres. If I wasn’t a novelist I’d be a screenwriter, so I naturally write books inspired by the visual media I’m consuming.


Love and Other Mistakes is on my personal summer reading list and I cannot wait to dive in! I have found that writers are often the best readers too, so I want to know what books are on your own reading list right now? 

Love this question!
1 – Jenny B Jones, I’ll Be Yours. I adore Jenny’s sassy style of romance and comedy!
2 – Victoria Selmen, Nothing To Lose. I enjoy female-driven thrillers, and I really enjoyed the first in her Ziba MacKenzie series about an ex-special forces psycholocial profiler who stops serial killers. I’m excited for this one, which is book 2!
3 – Ed Catmull, Creativity Inc. I just finished this book on Pixar’s culture and storytelling principles and I LOVED IT!!! My day job is working as a training developer at a bank that’s undergoing a big transformation, so the storytelling, the creative culture and the people management aspects to the book were all really interesting to me.

If you had to tell us the top 3 reasons that we should read Love and Other Mistakes, what would those reasons be? Why will we love it? 

1.      The love/hate relationship - Natalie has to work as a nanny for her ex-fiance and deal with their unresolved past and complicated present. If you enjoy Sweet Home Alabama, this could be for you!

2.      The comedy – laughter makes everything better. 😊 Fans of Bethany Turner’s Wooing Cadie McCaffrey may have a giggle at Love and Other Mistakes.

3.      The family drama. This isn’t a light-and-fluffy rom com—it’s a rom com with bite. Alongside the laughs, it’s full of complicated relationships both in the family and in the church. I really loved getting to portray both the best and worst of relationships in Christian culture and taking all that messiness to God.

Thank you again for taking the time to answer my questions. Before we go, I know I cannot wait to see what’s next from you! Can you let us know what’s coming up?

I’m super excited to take my next fictional couple to Australia in A Girl’s Guide to the Outback. I just turned in the edits and I can’t wait to share it with everyone! It features an Aussie hero and American heroine and most of the book happens in rural Australia, on a farm partly based on one from my life. It was so much fun getting to share my Aussie-ness and my farm kid upbringing, and I can’t wait for people to read it!

If January 2020 is too far away, right now you can read my sassy short The Kiss Dare. You receive it free when you sign up to my newsletter at jessicakatewriting.com, and some awesome authors like Bethany Turner, Susan May Warren and Rachel Hauck were kind enough to endorse it for me!




Follow along at JustRead Tours for a full list of stops!

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1 Comments:

  1. thanks for hosting me randi! you asked such fun questions!

    ReplyDelete

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