Friday 9 May 2014

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-fiancĂ©, 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!

22 comments:

  1. That sounds like a terrible date! You essentially babysat and then had your shoes stolen! At least there was that good book to go home to.

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  2. OMG that's horrible and even more horrible is I've had this experience too! Such a huge waste of time dating people who can't hold their liquor or those wo are stupid enough to think they can

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  3. Holy crap, that's like the mother of all bad dates. I'm lucky, I haven't had any bad ones :)

    Great author post, Tawna sounds like a great fun person to be around! ^_^

    ~Mogsy

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  4. Okay, drinking to excess is one thing, but stealing your shoes? Unforgiveable! LOL That was one horrible date. :P

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  5. Believe it or not my first date with mu husband wasn't all that great but still ended up together!

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    1. I am glad that one bad date did not put you off then :)

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  6. No "bad" dates, just one very awkward. It was a blind date set by a friend of mine. I don't know what she was thinking. The guy was a health nut, we went out for dinner, he wanted me to change my order for something healthy instead of what I wanted. I said no, he order something healthy of course, and he ate ¼ of his meal.
    He almost died when I ordered dessert. I wasn't hungry, just ordered it and ate it to mess with him. After dinner we went our separate ways and never talk again.

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  7. I've had several bad dates.

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  8. Thanks for the condolences on the bad date! Fortunately, I've done a bit better since then :)

    Also fortunately, my heroine in Frisky Business has a happy ending to her string of bad dates, too.

    Thanks for reading, guys!

    Tawna

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  9. Oh I loved your review for this. Um, err he stole your shoes :blinks: LOL so sorry!

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  10. Haha, that was an awesome bad date story! You know what, good riddance, even if it does mean you lost your shoes. :-)

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  11. LOL that was quite a date you had. Thanks for sharing with us the story.

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  12. As for myself, a bad date like that? Nope. The worst date must have been when we ate, then I made an excuse that I had left something at home, RAN (we lived at the same block) had violent diarrhea cos of the food and went back

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  13. No bad dates, but I went out with my husband a few times, I was going to break it off. Not a big chemistry right away. I was nice and went out one last time with me, just couldn't do it, such a nice guy. Now we have been married for thirty years.

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  14. Jeeze I haven't dated in soooo long ago I almost couldn't remember anything.

    When I was a teenager my boyfriend took me on a double date to see Reds with Robert Redford and at the time I HATED it and it was 3 hours long without intermission. Not really a fun teen date. But we did get to make out lol & get yelled out by the older crowd...

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  17. I had a really bad date in high school when I went to the junior prom. My date expected me to put out, and when I said no he refused to take me home. I had to walk two miles in high heels in the dark to get home.
    ayancey1974(at)gmail(dot)com

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