Saturday, August 22, 2015

Author Takeover & New Release: How to Save a Surgeon (Gambling Hearts #2) by C M Stone

I would like to welcome C M Stone to the blog today, author of How to Save a Surgeon. C M is doing a takeover about a makeover on the blog and I love the idea of it since I'm a huge beauty and makeup junkie and love all the pretty shiny things. :-) Please join me in giving C M a very warm welcome.

For Love and Makeovers

I love makeover stories. As somebody who came really late to figuring out hair and makeup—and who still fails pretty hard when it comes to fashion—there’s something magical about them to me. My heroine Darla in How to Save a Surgeon is in desperate need for a makeover for the best reason anyone ever needs one:

She wants one.

It’s fun to come up with all kinds of outlandish reasons for that Cinderella moment, but I love this simple reasoning. Nobody has a bet about making her presentable like Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady. She isn’t trying to change herself for a boy like Sandy from Grease. She just wants to look pretty and feel good.

curly

Before I started editing, the makeover chapter was one of the longest in the whole book. Darla had been covering her hair in hair spray every day to try to combat frizzing, hardly ever conditioned, and rarely trimmed. All the steps for what it would take to recover were there—and I knew them well, because this is the kind of neglect my hair once suffered—but it was a bit much for the book. Instead, I streamlined that chapter and saved what it would take to get hair back from that for here.

First of all, is hair spray bad for your hair? If you’re using it the right away, probably not. Light, occasional use with a good product is fine. A heavy layer of alcohol-based hair spray every day, on the other hand, can dry and damage your locks. Using alcohol-free products and giving your hair a rest occasionally can help keep it healthy. In Darla’s case, she was overdoing it and probably making her already hurting hair dryer than it needed to be.

Years of poor conditioning and too many split ends can’t be fixed in one night with a single trim and deep conditioning, but good styling can help hide the damage while hair recovers. How to pamper your hair and get it recovered is going to depend a lot on your hair texture, porosity, length, thickness, and what sorts of treatments it’s already been subjected to. With Darla’s high porosity 3B curls, she needs to use an anti-humectant styling cream or styling milk to cut down on that frizz and boost her definition. Even in as dry of a place as the Las Vegas setting in my book, frizz still happens. Moisturizing with something lightweight like sweet almond oil will help her hair, as will spraying a leave-in conditioner on it for refreshing her curls.

One thing that I knew before I started writing was that I didn’t want Darla’s hair to be straightened or anything like that. If the goal of a makeover is to make you feel good about yourself, then it should enhance and flatter the parts you love. For Darla, her curls were a part of her identity, so they needed to stay in some fashion.

For me, at least, using skin and hair products are about much more than just pleasing other people. At its best and most satisfying, it’s an act of self-love. Darla’s hero Jackson loves the way she looks, but the real happy ending for me is that she ends up loving it, too.

Thank you C M. I love that Darla is a curly hair girl. My girlfriend Bambi would definitely identify. She's a curly hair girl herself.

And now a little about the book ...


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How to Save a Surgeon
Gambling Hearts #2
By: C M Stone
Releasing August 17, 2015
Entangled Lovestruck

Buy Links:  Amazon | Barnes & Noble | iTunes | Kobo | Amazon UKAmazon Canada


Synopsis


He's sworn off all women...

When he lost the girl he loved, Dr. Jackson DeMatteo shut down his heart and became the kind of perfectionist surgeon that alienated him from the residents. Now Jackson has a very coveted promotion dangling before him...but it comes with a price. Working with adorably geeky first-year resident Darla Morales is definitely going to cost him. Big time.

She's just what the doctor ordered...

Completing her trauma residency demands confidence and Darla, who's already pretty high on the nerd scale, is definitely not confident. Worse still, she's forced to work with Doctor Dreamy, who makes her even more nervous and defensive. Darla needs to focus on the work and not his bedroom eyes if she ever hopes to become a trauma surgeon.



Excerpt

“It’s not like that,” Darla said. “It’s more like the lady version of wanting to rescue the damsel in distress.”

“The villain isn’t a damsel in distress.”

“But movies don’t make heroes emotionally vulnerable in the same way, and that’s what appeals about the bad guy. It’s not him being evil, it’s his pain. He’s hurt and looking for something. If he just let himself be loved, he could be saved.”

Jackson glanced at the screen. Had they watched the same movie? “Saved from what?”

“Himself.”

There was something in the way she said the word. This time he couldn’t resist touching her. His hand cupped her cheek, his thumb stroking her skin. “Are we still talking about the movie?”

“Well, everybody could use a little saving now and then.”

Her eyes closed as she leaned into his touch, and he had the urge to kiss her eyelids and feel the brush of her lashes.

“What do I need saving from?”

His fingers slid from her cheek to the side of her neck, lightly tracing the lines of her body to memorize them through touch. She melted back against the couch and rolled her head, exposing more of her neck to his touch.

She was quiet for so long that he began to wonder if she’d respond at all before her eyes opened a slit. “Being a stick in the mud who only ever wants to do things the same way?”

His fingertips just barely teased behind her ear and at the fine hairs of her nape. It was the lightest touch he could manage without breaking contact, but it still flooded his body with heat. “Is that what you think of me?”

“I’m not sure, but it seems like you try really hard to make people think that.”

He drew his hand away, torn between what he needed to do and what he wanted. “Maybe. I might be compensating a little.”

She licked her lips, her heavy-lidded eyes never wavering from his. “Compensating for what?”

“For occasionally being very, very unprofessional.”



Goodreads


Author Info


jsA native to Southern Nevada, C.M. Stone found happiness as an adult living a rural life in the frigid northwoods of Wisconsin. She wrote her first book at the age of seven--selling it door to door--and decided then and there that she would never accept any other career. Though she didn't know it at the time, that first book was romantic suspense. A lifelong love for romance novels set in at an early age, despite the fact that Cee considers herself possibly the least romantic person on earth. When she's not writing, Cee is busy wrangling critters and inventing new recipes.

Author Links:  Website | Facebook | Twitter | Goodreads | Pinterest





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2 comments:

  1. Being a curly girl myself - I love curly girl heroines. I would love to see the *actual* curly girl struggle in a story... including the protein treatments, conditioning treatments, sleeping on satin pillowcases and wearing a sleep cap... things that probably keep this curly girl single.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I thought wearing a sleeping cap only happened in the olden days. Didn't think it still happened now. Guess I'm not a curly hair girl. What do I know?

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