Wednesday, February 11, 2015

It Don’t Mean a Thing by Kim Taylor Blakemore Excerpt, Interview & Giveaway


It Don’t Mean a Thing
Kim Taylor Blakemore

Genre: Romance, Historical

Publisher: SilkWords

Date of Publication: August 4, 2014
ASIN: B00MG4C1E6

Word Count:  20,535 pick-your-path story

Book Description: 

Ruby dreams of Hollywood. A chance encounter with The Harmoneers, an all-female jazz group, offers the opportunity of a lifetime. Follow the gang as they scheme and double-cross.

And love?

Well, it don’t mean a thing.



Excerpt:

Sycamore Grove, California
1931

“I’m not marrying you, Audie McCardle. I most certainly am not.” Ruby Banks crossed her arms, pressed her lips tight, and gave a definitive shake of her head. She leaned toward the mirror over her hand-me-down vanity and stabbed a pin into her blonde curls. She twisted her head left and right, and fluffed the back of her hair. A strange tint of pink ran loose through the strands and waves. Maybe she should have been more careful with the mixture of peroxide and ammonia she’d used the previous night.
But between her mother running up the stairs and hugging her close, her father taking his pipe from his mouth long enough to yell that the hair potion was causing him an onset of lung disorder, and her little sister, Charlotte, jumping around and squawking nonsense about weddings weddings weddings, Ruby botched the dye job.
Never mind, she thought. If anyone asked, she’d say it was exactly the color she was hoping for.
Or she wouldn’t say anything at all. Jean Harlow wouldn’t say anything. Of that Ruby Banks was sure.
She snatched her apron from the end of her bed, bounded down the narrow stairs, and ignored her mother calling from the kitchen. Ruby pushed open the front gate and darted down the sidewalk. She was late (as usual) for her morning shift at the diner, and she still had to pick up the pies from Mrs. Jensen on the next block.
The early morning sun promised another day of horrible Central California heat. The sky would soon brown with the upturned soils of the fields, and the air already stank from the cows.
A beat-up Model T stake-bed truck rolled past Ruby. She heard the tires slow on the hard-packed soil of the street. Gears ground, and the truck reversed and pulled next to her.
John Mayer shifted his stub of a cigar to the other side of his mouth, tilted back his fedora, and smiled. His skin was bronze and wrinkled. He rubbed a weathered thumb across his chin. “Guess congratulations are in order.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Ruby lifted her head and continued walking. John Mayer kept the truck rolling slowly in reverse.
“Fine boy, Audie is.”
“So everyone says.”
“You make a sweet couple.”
“We’re not a couple.”
He scratched the shirt on his chest. “You don’t say.”
“He can buy any house he pleases in the Sears Roebuck catalog, but that doesn’t mean we’re a couple. And it certainly doesn’t mean I’m going to marry him.”
“You don’t say.”
“I do say. I have plans of my own.” She blew back a curl that had come loose. “Don’t you have some hogs to tie or something like that?”
“I don’t have hogs.”
“You know what I’m saying.”
He chewed his cigar then shifted the gears. The truck took a jump and shimmied. “You got a mean streak, Ruby. Yes, miss, you do.” With that, he was off down the road in a swirl of dirt.
Ruby wiped her mouth with her handkerchief. She patted her hair and strode up the wood steps to Mrs. Jensen’s porch. She knocked three times on the screen door frame and stepped back. Mrs. Jensen shuffled to the door, balancing five boxes of peach pies.
Only the top of half of her face was visible above the stack. She passed the boxes to Ruby and wiped her hands on a flour-coated apron. “I hear congratulations are in order.”
“Aw, nuts.”
Ruby’s heels cracked against the pavement. She passed the Esso station and VFW Hall and drew near the two blocks that made up Sycamore Grove’s downtown. The neon spire of the Odeon dwarfed the squat brick of its neighbors. She glared up, worried that this upcoming non-wedding would be splattered in black and white across the marquee. Luckily not. It remained safely Gable and Harlow in Red Dust.
Maud Riley stood under the awning of Rexall Drugs, waiting, as she always did, for Ruby. Her gray felt cloche sat low on her head, the nutmeg tufts of her bob feathered under the soft rim. She shifted from foot to foot, tapping her fingers against her black-and mustard-checked skirt. As Ruby neared, Maud narrowed her eyes and blinked fast before shaking her head. She pursed her lips and twisted them into a strained smile.
“What’s wrong with you?” Ruby asked.
Maud’s eyebrows met in a frown. “Nothing. Not a thing.” She waved her hand for no reason that Ruby could ascertain and fell in step beside her. “I guess I have to wish —”
“Don’t you start.” She shifted the pies to her hip. “I can tolerate all the little gifts he gives me. I mean, a girl does need emery boards and cologne. But buying a house? That’s called unbounded impudence.”
“I think it was just a down payment.”
“It’s still a lot of cheek. What does he think? I’m going to roll over like a, like a starving dog and do whatever he commands?” Ruby stopped in front of the diner, set the boxes on the cement and faced Maud. “He hasn’t even asked me to marry him. And you know what? When he does, I’m going to laugh like this — HA-ha. Because I’ve got all that money Aunt Caroline left me, and come September, I’m going to take the bus to Merced and then the train to Hollywood. And in neither of those vehicles can you fit a Sears and Roebuck house and an ego the size of Audie McCardle’s. And when he comes in for breakfast, I’m going to tell him so.”
Maud crossed her arms over her thin frame and swayed back and forth.
 “You got something to say, just say it.”
Maud bit her lip and shrugged.
“What does that mean?”
“It means nothing.” Maud swung her gaze around the street and up at the Odeon spire and then stared over her shoulder at the empty diner. “You like my skirt?”
“What?”
“I wore it just for you. So you could see how the pattern came out. And such.” She gave that funny wave again, as if she were swatting a big bug. “Never mind. I’ve got an early piano lesson to give.”
“Well, don’t let me keep you.” Ruby bent to pick up the pies. “Would you mind opening the door for me? I mean, if you have time.”
“I always have time for you.”
“Are you all right?”
“Of course I’m all right. Why?”
“You’re red as a beet.”
Maud put the flats of her palms against her cheeks, turned on her heel, and rushed away, the bell of her skirt flapping against her knees.
“But the door, Maud … ”



About the Author:

Kim Taylor Blakemore writes historical fiction and romance that explores women's lives and brings their struggles and triumphs out of the shadows of history and onto the canvas of our American past. She wishes to share the stories of women whose lives are untold, who don’t exist in textbooks: the disenfranchised, the forgotten, those with double lives and huge hearts filled with weakness and courage.

Her novel Bowery Girl, set in 1883 Lower Eastside Manhattan was recently re-released in Kindle and paperback. Under the Pale Moon, is due for release in Fall 2015. Set in post-World War II Monterey, California, it explores the relationship of a married woman breaking the bonds of conformity, and a combat nurse haunted by the ghosts of war.

Her interactive historical romances The Very Thought of You and It Don't Mean a Thing, are out now on Kindle and SilkWords.com. She is also the author of the novel  Cissy Funk, winner of the WILLA Literary Award for Best Young Adult Fiction.

She’s a member of the Historical Novel Society, Women Writing the West and Romance Writers of America. In addition to writing novels, she facilitates workshops for PDX Writers in Portland, Oregon.



Twitter: @kimrtaylor


Interview

Where are you from?
I'm originally from the Monterey Peninsula on the Central Coast of California, but have lived in Portland, Oregon for the past eight years. I consider both areas my "hometown". They fill my heart.
Tell us your latest news?
In January, my novel "Bowery Girl" was re-released. It's set in the Bowery of New York in 1883 and follows two young women, the pickpocket Molly Flynn and the prostitute Annabelle Lee and their fight for survival on the streets. It was a complicated and interesting time period to research. I am so glad the women's stories are being read again.
The biggest news? We rescued a kitten who had been hit by a car, named him Chester, and he now thinks he's one of the dogs. I think his name should be Heffalump, because he's not the most quiet of cats.
When and why did you begin writing?
I've been writing since I was little, the typical stories with haunted houses and ponies and girls with swords. After college and a drama degree, I tried my hand at playwriting, discarding it for acting. I always wanted to be a writer - I was and am an avid reader - but it wasn't until I stuck in my house in a snowstorm and bored out of my gourd that I actually wrote the beginnings of a novel. And the snowstorm stopped, but the novel kept going. And I was hooked.
When did you first consider yourself a writer?
I think it was with the sale of that first book, Side Dish. It was a light and silly romantic comedy, now out of print and the company that published it defunct.
Wait, now that I think about it, it was the writing of the first book that made me feel like a writer. Because I sat down every day and worked with words.
What inspired you to write your first book?
Boredom. And the fact that I needed to somehow come to terms with my awful life in Los Angeles, the one I'd run to Colorado to get away from. I wanted bad memories to become funny fiction.
Do you have a specific writing style?
My first book was the only contemporary I wrote. I turned to historical fiction, and I try to have the style of my writing reflect the tone of writing from the periods in which they take place. For instance, "It Don't Mean a Thing" is set in 1930s California and has the rhythm of comedy films from that time. My other historical romance for Silk Words, "The Very Thought of You" is set in the mid-1950s, and as it is about the experience of a lesbian woman in that time, has a more measured and slightly repressed tone. My novel "Bowery Girl" uses a bit of the stylistic narrative that you’d find in novels of the late 1880s, with the point of view moving from tight 3rd person to omniscient.
How did you come up with the title?
I thought it would be great fun to have the titles for both Silk Words stories be that of a popular song from the year the story takes place. I pored through lots of top-40 lists, listened to the music, read through the lyrics, then settling on songs/titles that reflected the pace and mood and plot of the stories.
Is there a message in your novel that you want readers to grasp?
I'm not sure I think in message, or write toward messages. I am much more interested in how women lived in and experienced those times.
How much of the book is realistic?
I do a lot of research for a time period, to ground the reader and the characters into the setting. "The Very Thought of You" has a lot of realism of what a woman's life would be in Portland, Oregon in the 1950s, particularly the lengths she would need to go to hide her true self. In "It Don't Mean a Thing", there was more leeway, more of a feeling of what it would be like in a small town in the 1930s.
Are experiences based on someone you know, or events in your own life?
My books and stories are purely fiction. Although, there is the teacher in "Bowery Girl" who might have some qualities I have as a teacher...
What books have most influenced your life most?
The list would be long! I think I’ll list those that have stuck with me a long time. That would include (but not be limited to): “Little Women”, “Little House on the Prairie”, “Gone with the Wind”, “Life and Fate”, “The Book Thief”, the Thursday Next series by Jasper FForde, and anything by John Steinbeck.
If you had to choose, which writer would you consider a mentor?
Any writer? From any time? Wow. Steinbeck for his efficiency of language and deep love of wayward characters. Sarah Waters for her impeccable dialogue and complicate characters. Virginia Woolf for, well, everything. Sharyn November, my editor for “Bowery Girl” for teaching me how to build the novel.
What book are you reading now?
I'm reading a sweet contemporary F/F romance, “Zero Visibility” by Georgia Beers (wonderful writer – her novel “96 Hours” about the hours after 911 is intense and amazing), and “Shadow of Night”, a rip-roaringly cool fantasy by Deborah Harkness.
Are there any new authors that have grasped your interest?
I’m not sure they’re new by the time I read them! Elizabeth Wein is amazing. She wrote “Code Name Verity”. If anyone wants to send me some recommendations of new authors, I’d love it! PS – I love historical fiction with strong women…
What are your current projects?
I'm hard at work on another historical novel, "Under the Pale Moon", set in Monterey in 1946. It explores the lives of Irene Dodd, a woman frustrated by the constraints of her life after her responsibilities during World War II, and Kath Walker, an Army combat nurse haunted by the ghosts of war. It's due out in Fall 2015.

What would you like my readers to know?

Books rock. I couldn’t live without them. And I’ll bet, if you’re reading this, you can’t live without them either. What a lucky bunch we are!

Tour giveaway

3 Kindle copies of  Bowery Girl

3 ebook copies It Don’t Mean a Thing


SilkWords is the go-to source for interactive romance and erotic fiction.

With gorgeous custom covers and a clean, sophisticated design, the SilkWords site offers a secure, upscale reading environment. In addition to content on their web site, they offer stories for purchase in the standard e-book formats.

SilkWords is owned and operated by a full-time mom with a background in genetics and an RWA RITA-nominated, multi-published sci-fi romance author.

Their technology guy and site designer was the founder of Microsoft Xbox Live.

SilkWords features two formats that allow readers to choose how the stories will proceed.

Pick Your Path:

Will she or won't she? With which man (or woman) in which location? With Pick Your Path romance, you decide. Romance and branched fiction are made for each other, like picking your favorite flavor of ice cream...positions, partners, and paraphernalia, oh my!

Reader Vote:

Readers vote at choice points and decide how the story will continue. These stories are a great way for readers and authors to connect. It’s exciting to be part of a developing story!





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