Who's That Girl? Blog Tour: Q&A with Mhairi McFarlane and Giveaway

Hello everybody and welcome to my stop on the Who's That Girl? blog tour! I'm a huge fan of Mhairi McFarlane and absolutely loved Who's That Girl? when I read it in hardcover last year, if you missed it you can check out my review here. To celebrate the paperback release I have a Q&A with Mhairi herself and am giving you the chance to win a copy of the book over on Twitter.

Q&A with Mhairi McFarlane

1. Who’s That Girl? is your fourth novel what can fans of your previous books expect from this one?
I was talking to a friend the other day who said I dish worse and worse things out to my heroines, so, trauma, it seems! Who’s That Girl? is about 30something Edie, who becomes a social pariah after an incident at a wedding and is thrown out of her Instagrammable London life, back home to Nottingham, where she has to contend with unfiltered reality. Whereupon she meets hot new star, actor Elliot, who’s handling being famous, while Edie is coping with being infamous. Antics ensue.

2. One of my favourite things about your books is your heroines. Which of your characters is the most like you? 
Ooh that’s a good question. Probably Rachel in You Had Me At Hello, if that’s not too obvious an answer. I’m an ex journalist who loves Manchester, and like Rachel, an arch procrastinator who can’t make her mind up about anything. Obviously the plot of that book is not autobiography though! When I wrote it, I was somewhat tired of chick lit heroines being lovely angels who are assailed by bad luck, when lets face it, most of the time, we have a big hand in making our bad luck. So I definitely gave Rachel plenty of my flaws. Her habit of getting out of difficult conversations by making crass jokes…yeah…I didn’t stretch a million miles to write that. Like Rachel, I had a great time at university and made some lifelong friends, too. The idea for that book came from me thinking what a powerful nostalgia those years gave me, and wondering: wow, what if you’d met your love of your life during those years, and not seen him since? Imagine THAT. For me, fiction starts in a truth, a jumping off point for playing the What If? game.

3. What’s been your best moment as an author so far? 
Hmmm let’s see. The funny thing is, you spend so long dreaming of getting a book deal and once you have one, you wait for it to ‘land.’ I’ll be honest, I thought there’d be a key moment – possibly holding a cocktail, on a villa balcony, watching a setting sun – where it’d dawn on me ‘OMG! I AM AUTHOR!’ but it never happened. I still don’t quite believe it and fully expect to wake up and find myself late for a shift on my old job (I still have that anxiety dream.) I can’t pin one best moment, really: a call from my agent to say I’d had a pre publication offer for my first book from Germany was an absolute ‘I don’t believe this happening’ swoon. I ran home and shouted up the stairs to my boyfriend ‘We can get the fridge!!’ (I had an obsession with getting a green Smeg. Yes, I am a dreadful person.) I hope that answer doesn’t make it sound like it was all about money because it absolutely wasn’t, but knowing I had enough funds for a while to call it my official job? That was incredible. And seeing the cover artwork for You Had Me At Hello, with my name on it. My editor emailed me it and I was screaming at the thumbnail photo before I’d even opened it. And then there’s the day you get a box of books…your own book. Best job in the world.

4. You’re known for writing smart, funny women’s fiction are there any authors who influenced your writing style? 
Thank you! Oh God, plenty. Marian Keyes is the don, of course, for humour, storytelling smarts, and that wonderful voice you could read all day and night. Oddly, also, I’d have to say Joss Whedon made all the difference to me. Watching Buffy was when I realised that genre could tell really impactful, adult stories: so many people dismissed Buffy as teen fluff and it was a total Trojan horse for some stunningly inventive, mature ideas. It gave me the confidence to bend a few of chick lit’s unofficial rules.

5. Where do you get the ideas behind your books? 
I start with a challenge or question that interests me. So for example, with Edie in Who’s That Girl, it was, what if someone good at managing her image, found it all crashing down in one day? You know, so much of our self worth is now bound up on these social media sites which we look at constantly on glass computers in our pockets. What if you had all that torn away and had to confront who you were, without all that superficial affirmation? When I plan a book, it doesn’t start with ‘who’s the boy?’ Although that question follows shortly behind…

6. Do you have any advice for aspiring writers?
I have so much I never know what to pick! The most basic I can find is: never write ‘into the market,’ ie, try to second guess what will sell. Always, always start with the story that grabs your guts and won’t let go. If yours doesn’t do that, scrap it and find the one that does. Enthusiasm is palpable in the writing, and contagious: if you love your book then so will other people. NB: I am talking about the initial concept, NOT the process itself. You will hate your own writing five times a day and tell yourself you’re useless and awful. I’m afraid the self doubt never goes away.

7. What’s the last great book that you read?
Right now I’m reading Sarah Pinborough’s new thriller Behind Her Eyes and it’s a belter. So, so tense! Will be a film I reckon, I’m calling it now.

8. Can you tell us a bit about what you’re working on next? 
My fifth novel! Readers can expect: a northern city setting. A big shock. Loss. Lots of messy emotion. More social media and mobiles messing up our lives. My first BLONDE heroine, a barmaid with attitude called Georgina. Probably the same amount of swearing. A love interest or two. No spoilers.

Thank you so much for being on the blog today Mhairi!

For your chance to win a copy of Who's That Girl? head over to Twitter 

⭐️GIVEAWAY⭐️
Win a copy of #WhosThatGirl by @MhairiMcF
RT & Follow @JessHeartsBooks to enter
UK only https://t.co/6E31qiVWiI pic.twitter.com/02NUbfu63j

— Jess Hearts Books (@JessHeartsBooks) February 8, 2017

Don't miss the rest of the blog tour

Who's That Girl? is available to buy in paperback in all good bookshops as of the 9th February

January Favourites: Life, Books, Blogs and More!

Hello everyone and welcome to my very first monthly favourites post! This is my new, more personal way of wrapping up each month that allows me to include some of my favourite things outside of books and blogging. I hope that you like the new format as much as I do! Here are the things I have been loving in January...

 Favourite Books 

 

Out of the ten books that I read in January my absolute favourites have to be Wing Jones by Katherine Webber and My Sweet Revenge by Jane Fallon. Wing Jones is a YA book set in the nineties that follows a biracial teenage girl who takes up running after her brother is in a car accident. It's a gorgeous debut about about losing your way, finding your feet, and chasing your dreams and was the perfect book to start the year off with! My Sweet Revenge follows a lady called Paula as she sets out to make her husband fall back in love with her after finding out that he's been having an affair so that when she leaves him it hurts him as much as he's hurt her. This is such an entertaining and fun read and is perfect if you like smart and sassy Women's Fiction. I reviewed both books this month so if you'd like to read more of my thoughts you can check out my review for Wing Jones here and my review for My Sweet Revenge here.

Favourite to Listen to

   

I'm a huge Ed Sheeran fan and have loved his music and followed his career since the very beginning so when he dropped two new singles at the start of the year it's safe to say that 2017 was already off to a good start for me. I love both songs so much and have been playing them on repeat ever since they came out, I think they show two totally different sides to Ed's music and demonstrate just how diverse his range of talents are as a songwriter and musician. If I had to pick one I'd say Castle on the Hill is my favourite although I absolutely love the Shape of You music video. Roll on the 3rd March, I already have my copy of Divide on pre-order!

Favourite to Watch

So last year I discovered the absolute joy that is Brooklyn 99 on Netflix and since then it's become one of my all time favourite shows. The 4th season is currently airing in the UK on Thursday nights on E4 so needless to say Thursday nights have become my new favourite. This show never fails to cheer me up when I'm feeling down or have had a bad day and it goes from strength to strength with each season. It's funny, witty and silly with a great cast of characters who at this point have honestly come to feel like friends. If you haven't watched this show yet and want to watch something guaranteed to make you laugh and feel good this is the show to watch!

Favourite in Beauty

After the indulgence of Christmas my skin has been breaking out like crazy so for my birthday I asked for a few new skincare products to help clear it up. After doing a lot of research on my favourite beauty blogs I decided to try out the Liz Earle Cleanse and Polish Hot Cloth Cleanser and the three L'Oreal Paris Pure Clay Masks and I absolutely love them, they've definitely helped balance out my sensitive, combination, acne prone skin. I use the Liz Earle cleanser daily followed by a toner and moisturizer, I absolutely love the smell of this product and how using it feels like having a treatment at a spa. It's so gentle on my sensitive skin and has lots of skin loving ingredients that make my skin feel really clean and clarified after use. I use the face masks two to three times a week, each mask does something different so I apply them on the areas needed as a multimask. Once a week I use the detox mask all over, the charcoal in it is really good for drawing out impurities in the skin helping to avoid the breakouts that I am prone to. The combination of these products has left my skin looking healthier and clearer and all without drying out or irritating my sensitive skin - perfect!

Favourite Online

Being a blogger I absolutely love January, everyone always comes back to blogging after Christmas refreshed and ready for a new year and there are always so many brilliant posts and videos to watch. This month saw the return of one of my favourite book bloggers Vicki at Cosy Books, Vicki is one of the very first book bloggers I started to follow so I am thrilled that she is back. We have very similar taste in books so if you don't already I'd definitely recommend giving Vicki a follow! Over on YouTube I have been absolutely loving watching Fabulous Book Fiend's vlogs she features a good selection of Women's Fiction, YA and Non-Fiction and does lots of different types of videos. My recent favourite has to be her review of The One We Fell in Love With by Paige Toon it made me finally decide to pick it up and I ended up really enjoying it. A blogger who I always love reading is Jim from YA Yeah Yeah but I especially loved his post in January all about jealousy and not feeling good enough it's a topic I could really relate to and if you haven't read it already I'd recommend checking it out here.

Favourite Thing

I received a 2017 Happiness Planner for Christmas and I have been absolutely loving it! This isn't just your typical planner, if you couldn't guess from the title it is a planner with a focus on fitting more of what makes you happy into your life. The first section of the planner has a series of questions to help you figure out what makes you happy, what makes you sad, your goals and the obstacles in the way of you achieving them. It then helps you formulate a plan to help you get the most out of the year ahead. After using this for a month I'd say this planner is helping me live a more balanced life focused in the present. It's perfect for personal goals, work goals and to help you create a schedule that balances what you need to do and what you want to do. It's kept me so organized and the gratitude section at the bottom of each page to fill out at the end of every day has really helped me to change the way I think and to actively seek out the good things that would usually get overshadowed by the bad things. Already this planner has massively changed my life from the way I think, to taking the time to do the things that make me happy, to helping me work towards my goals every single day. I can't recommend this planner enough.

Favourite Memory

This month me and two of my best friends visited one of my favourite places in the world for my birthday, Astley Book Farm. It's the largest second hand bookshop in the Midlands and I am lucky enough to live a ten minute drive away. I'm not exaggerating when I say that you can spend a whole day there and that's exactly what we did lost in the corridors of books, eating large slices of their delicious cake and chatting on one of the squishy sofas in front of a burning log fire. It was absolute bliss. I wrote a whole post about why it's my favourite bookshop for Books are my Bag here if you haven't been yet and live close enough I'd definitely recommend a visit!

 I hope you had a great start to the New Year! 

What were some of your favourite things in January?

Perfect Remains Blog Tour: Who Killed Helen Fields? Clue Number 10

Hello everyone and welcome to my stop on the Perfect Remains blog tour! Today I have the next chilling clue to help you find Helen Fields' killer. Make sure you follow the rest of the blog tour to discover all of the clues and solve the case!

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Perfect Remains is available to buy now from all good bookshops

The One Blog Tour: Extract and Giveaway!

Hello everyone and welcome to my stop on The One blog tour! Today I have the first chapter of the book to share with you and if you just can't wait to read more then you're in luck as I have 3 copies to give away to 3 lucky readers!

CHAPTER 1 

MANDY

Mandy stared at the photograph on her computer screen and held her breath.

The shirtless man had cropped, light brown hair, and posed on a beach with his legs spread apart with the top half of his wetsuit rolled down to his waist. His eyes were the clearest shade of blue. His huge grin contained two perfectly aligned rows of white teeth, and she could almost taste the salt water dripping from his chest and onto the surfboard lying by his feet.

‘Oh my Lord,’ she whispered to herself, and let out a long breath she didn’t realise she’d been holding. She felt her fingertips tingle and her face flush, and wondered how on earth her body would react to him in person if that’s how it responded to just one photograph.

The coffee in her polystyrene cup was cold but she still finished it. She took a screengrab of the photograph and added it to a newly created folder on her desktop entitled ‘Richard Taylor’. She scanned the office to check if anyone was watching what she was up to in her booth, but no one was paying her any attention.

Mandy scrolled down the screen to look at the other photographs in his Facebook album ‘Around the World’. He was certainly well travelled, she noticed, and he had been to places she’d only ever seen on TV or in films. In many pictures he was in bars, trails and temples, posing by landmarks, enjoying golden beaches and choppy waters. He was rarely on his own. She liked that he seemed the gregarious type.

Curious, she looked back further into his timeline, from when he first joined social media as a sixth former and through his three years at university. She even found him attractive as a gawky teenager.

After an hour and a half of gawping at nearly the entirety of the handsome stranger’s history, Mandy made her way to his Twitter feed to see what he felt the need to share with the world. But all he ranted about was Arsenal’s rise and fall in the Premier League, occasionally broken up by retweets of animals falling over or running into stationary objects.

Their interests appeared to differ greatly, and she questioned exactly why they had been Matched and what they might have in common. Then she reminded herself she no longer needed the mindset required for using dating websites and apps; Match Your DNA was based on biology, chemicals and science – none of which she could get her head around. But she trusted it with all her heart, like millions and millions of others did.

Mandy moved on to Richard’s LinkedIn profile, which revealed that since graduating from Worcester University two years earlier, he’d worked as a personal trainer in a town approximately forty miles from hers. No wonder his body appeared so solid, she thought, and she imagined how it might feel on top of hers.

She hadn’t set foot in a gym since her induction a year ago, when her sisters insisted she should stop lamenting her failed marriage and start concentrating on her recovery. They’d whisked her away to a nearby hotel day-spa where she’d been massaged, plucked, waxed, hot-stoned, tanned and massaged again until any thought of her ex had been pummelled out of every back and shoulder knot and each clogged pore of her skin. The gym membership had followed along with a promise that she would keep up with the workout schedule they’d set up for her. Motivating herself to work out regularly had yet to become part of her weekly routine, but she paid for the membership regardless.

She began to imagine what her children with Richard might look like, and if they’d inherit their father’s blue eyes or be brown like hers; whether they’d be dark haired and olive skinned like her or fair and pale like him. She found herself smiling.

‘Who’s that?’

‘Jesus!’ she yelled. The voice had made her jump. ‘You scared me to death.’

‘Well, you shouldn’t have been looking at porn at work then.’ Olivia grinned, and offered her a sweet from a bag of Haribo. Mandy declined with a shake of her head.

‘It wasn’t porn, he’s an old friend.’

‘Yeah, yeah, whatever you say. Keep an eye out for Charlie though, he’s after some sales figures from you.’

Mandy rolled her eyes, then looked at the clock in the corner of her screen. She realised that if she didn’t start doing some work soon she’d end up taking it home with her. She clicked on the little red ‘x’ in the corner and cursed her Hotmail account for assuming the Match Your DNA confirmation email was spam. It had sat in her junk folder for the last six weeks until, by chance, she had discovered it earlier that afternoon.

‘Mandy Taylor, wife of Richard Taylor, pleased to meet you,’ she whispered. She noticed she was absent-mindedly twiddling an invisible ring around her wedding finger.

 Want to keep reading? For your chance to win a copy of The One head over to Twitter! 

⭐️GIVEAWAY⭐️
Win 1 of 3 copies of THE ONE
RT & Follow @JessHeartsBooks to enter
UK only #MatchYourDNA https://t.co/dODPwJVKA6 pic.twitter.com/WUUJMjXdjs

— Jess Hearts Books (@JessHeartsBooks) February 1, 2017

 Don't miss the rest of the blog tour

The Things I Should Have Told You Blog Tour

Hello everyone! Today I'm so excited to be kicking off The Things I Should Have Told You blog tour. I absolutely love Carmel Harrington and am thrilled to have her on the blog today sharing a guest post on the time she met one of her own favourite authors, Jilly Cooper.

Meeting Jilly Cooper by Carmel Harrington 

I’ve always been a self professed, proud, book geek. As a child my favourite place to visit was our local library and every night I transported myself to new and exciting worlds, with just a flick of a page. Then, one rainy Sunday afternoon, when I was fifteen, I picked up a copy of Rider’s, by the author Jilly Cooper. I had to hide this one from my mother, who wouldn’t have approved. That cover, with the cheeky hand! By the end of the first chapter, I was hooked. I couldn’t get enough of the shenanigans of Rupert Campbell Black. Like a child given just one chocolate button, I craved more. You see, Jilly Cooper’s raucous romps set in the beautiful English countryside, are glorious. Her writing is witty, funny, romantic, corny, sexy and unputdownable.

Never in my wildest dreams did I ever think that one day I’d get to meet her. But guess what? I did! Brace yourselves, there’s no way around this, I’m going to have to get all boasty mcboasty for a bit….

You see it all came about because I was shortlisted for a BGE Irish Book Award in 2016, for The Things I Should Have Told You. I can’t explain how much that meant to me. But then, to top that, news leaked that Jilly Cooper was being honoured with a LifeTime Achievement Award and my giddiness levels skyrocketed.

On the awards night, holding Charlotte Ledger’s hand, (my gorgeous editor), we made our way to Jilly’s table. A crowd had formed around her, as other writers and publishing folk took their turn to say hello.

L-R, Carmel Harrington, Jilly Cooper, Charlotte Ledger

Finally she turned to us. I think we both curtseyed. I know I did. We were meeting book royalty after all.

I breathlessly told Jilly how much I adored her books, how I devoured them as a young adult, how loved she was here in Ireland, how much I loved her.

And do you know what she did?

She leaned down and kissed my hand, then said in that beautiful, terribly posh, lilting voice, ‘Oh you are heavenly.’

Me. Heavenly. Words that she would have used to describe beloved characters like Taggie. I shall never forget that.

I didn’t win an Irish Book Award on the night. But I didn’t walk away empty handed.
I met one of my heroines and she didn't disappoint one tiny bit. 
To rob her phrase, she was heavenly.

 Don't miss the rest of the blog tour!