Author Post and Giveaway: Tawna Fenske

Please help me welcome Tawna Fenske to my blog today :) 

Welcome!

Hello, and thanks for inviting me to hang out with you here at Book Girl of Mur-y-Castell! Who brought the wine?

Today we’re talking about bad dates. We’ve all had them, right? In my new romantic comedy, Frisky Business, my heroine endures more than her share. After vowing not to date any more wealthy men, Marley embarks on a quest to date only blue collar guys. While the plan makes it easier for her keep her distance from Will—the quirky, unlikely millionaire she desperately doesn’t want to fall for—it sends Marley down a path of truly terrible dates.

On that note, I’ve been asked to share several of my own bad date stories throughout the blog tour for Frisky Business. Let’s kick things off with a story from my college days.

It was the summer before my senior year in college when a guy I’d met at the gym asked me to accompany him to a formal event. I’d been admiring his physique for a few weeks, but I knew little about him beyond how many reps he could bench press.

“How about you pick me up at six?” I suggested once we’d  hammered out details of the date.

“Er, right—one problem with that,” he said. “I don’t actually have a car.”

It wasn’t terribly unusual for college students not to have cars, so I didn’t think much of it and offered to pick him up instead. The day of our big date arrived, and I spent a long time primping and fussing with my hair and the sexy cocktail dress I’d bought for the occasion.

I arrived at his house and noticed he looked rather unsteady weaving his way down the driveway toward my car. 

“Whaddya say we stop off for a margarita first?” he suggested as he got in. 

“I’d say you’ve already gotten a head start,” I replied, recoiling a bit from the tequila fumes wafting from the passenger seat.

We headed off to the event, an arts and culture affair I’d been looking forward to for weeks. As I stood admiring a painting, my date wandered off in the direction of the bar.

“Here,” he said, thrusting a glass of wine at me when he returned. “Drink up.”

I sipped it slowly while he guzzled his like Sprite. He set down his empty glass and looked at me. “You gonna drink that?”

I took another sip of my wine, then handed him the glass. “Knock yourself out.”

“Thanks,” he slurred.

“Don’t mention it.”

Our evening progressed like that, with my date disappearing at intervals and returning with glasses of wine he offered up with abundant generosity. 

“You really should drink that,” he said, nodding at the glass I’d been holding for the last thirty minutes.

“I’m pacing myself,” I told him. “I have to drive, remember?”

“Ah, driving. Right. Right, right, right-e-o.” 

It dawned on me there might be a good reason my date lacked an automobile or the license to operate one. I took another sip of my wine. 

“Drink up, c’mon,” he urged. “That’s really good stuff. I’m gonna head to the bathroom, okay?”

I pointed him in the right direction. The instant his back was turned, I poured half my wine into a potted plant.

At the end of the evening, he required assistance getting to the car. By then, my feet were killing me, so as soon as my date was buckled into the passenger seat, I yanked off my ridiculously high heels and dropped them in his lap. 

“Hold those,” I said. “Let’s get you home now, okay?”

“You’re taking me back to your place?” He gave me a lecherous grin and put a hand on my leg.

“No,” I told him, returning his hand to his lap. “I’m taking you to your house and then I’m going home to put on pajamas and read a good book.”

“Cool. Hey, you think you could drop me at the bar at the end of my block?”

I parked in front of his house moments later. He threw open the door and lurched out. “Thanks, man,” he said. “Awesome date.”

He staggered up his driveway and fumbled with the doorknob for five full minutes. It wasn’t until he got inside that I realized he still had my shoes.

I never saw them—or him—again. 

Wow, that was quite the date 0_0 

Giveaway

1 copy of Frisky Business

1. US and Canada only

2. Ends May 18th

3. To enter I want you all to tell me if you have had a bad date (and if you haven't had a bad date just tell me so and you are in ;)

No more rich men for Marley Cartman. Absolutely not. Thanks to her dad, her ex-fiancé, and the overbearing donors she schmoozes for a living, she’s had more than her fill. From now on, she wants blue-collar men with dirt under their fingernails. But when Marley makes a break to handle donor relations for a wildlife sanctuary, she finds herself drawn to the annoyingly charming—and disturbingly wealthy—chairman of the board. Judging by his hipster T-shirts, motley assortment of canine companions, and penchant for shaking up stuffy board meetings, you’d never guess that William Barclay the Fifth is a brilliantly successful businessman. Will has good reason to be leery of scheming women, and as he and Marley butt heads over the wisdom of bringing grumpy badgers to charity events, he can’t help but wonder if his new donor relations coordinator is hiding something other than a perfect figure beneath that designer suit…

Bio:

Tawna Fenske traveled a career path that took her from newspaper reporter to English teacher in Venezuela to marketing geek to PR manager for her city's tourism bureau. An avid globetrotter and social media fiend, Tawna is the author of the popular blog, Don't Pet Me, I'm Writing, and a member of Romance Writers of America. She lives with her fiancé in Bend, Oregon, where she'll invent any excuse to hike, bike, snowshoe, float the river, or sip wine on her back deck. Tawna has published several romantic comedies with Sourcebooks, including Making Waves and Believe it or Not, as well as the interactive fiction caper, Getting Dumped, with Coliloquy and Marine for Hire with Entangled Brazen. Her latest Sourcebooks release, Frisky Business, was praised by Kirkus Reviews as "an appealing blend of lighthearted fun and emotional tenderness." Tawna's quirky brand of comedy and romance has earned kudos from RT Book Reviews, which nominated her debut novel for Contemporary Romance of the Year, and from the Chicago Tribune, which noted, "Fenske's wildly inventive plot & wonderfully quirky characters provide the perfect literary antidote to any romance reader's summer reading doldrums."

Thanks!