Feed Your Reader: new Feb releases

Posted on February 25, 2016 by escapepublishingblog

Released February 25…

A small town romance sent against the romance of the beautiful Dandenong mountains about loss, lies, and the courage to live true.

There’s nothing left for Adele Devereux in Sydney: no job, no relationship, no hope, and no diagnosis for her shy, uncommunicative daughter. So she packs her bags, takes her meagre savings, and moves her small family to the country. She never expects to meet Tom Wade, a man facing his own hopeless situation, but whose kindness reaches her daughter in an unexpected friendship. Adele finds herself drawn further in to the community – and into her attraction to Tom.

Introducing the new Dollar for a Dream rural romance series

Move to the country for $1 a week…

Dulili is suffering a people drought. Over the years more people have moved away than have arrived to stay in this old New South Wales farming town, and now only a handful of young families and elderly residents are left. The locals put a plan into action to entice newcomers: offering the town’s empty houses to newcomers from anywhere in Australia. Who could resist renting a beautiful homestead for a dollar a week?

A Heart Stuck on Hope

Honey Hill House

The Healing Season

Forced Proximity: bringing out your best (and worst)

Posted on February 8, 2016 by escapepublishingblog

by Charmaine Ross

I like writing characters in close forced proximity. What do I mean by that? Well, for example the male and female characters might be cops and they are sent on a stakeout together. Something goes wrong and the stakeout isn’t just for two hours, it’s for two weeks.

OR a boss asks his PA to accompany him on a conference, but the conference is extended into emergency meetings with suppliers and he needs her to stay with him. Two eyes and ears are better than one.

OR she is moving towns. He’s the head of a furniture removal company and has to take on this job as one as his employees broken his leg in a skiing accident, another has to take his wife to hospital because she’s giving birth, one woke up with a hangover the size of New South Wales (plus he’s still over the limit) and he can’t possibly drive and our hero is now understaffed. They have to travel the length of the country in the same truck as she sent her car on ahead via rail.

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OR…well, the list is pretty endless. Of course, some ideas are also better than others.

Why do I like close proximity? I think it brings out the best and worst behaviours in people. When people can separate, they can create a wall and remain on their best behaviour, sometimes for years. They have an excuse not to tell the other person how they feel because they can calm down, think, re-evaluate. When you remove that wall, the characters have nowhere to hide. There is no down time. They have to talk. Communicate with each other. There will be conflict. Sparks will fly and secrets will come out and people will have no choice but to react. And that makes for an interesting story.

Having your characters close adds spice. Imagine yourself in a situation where you have no choice but to talk and interact. Not just for a couple of hours but for an extended amount of time. If you really don’t like someone, that’s going to be pretty obvious. If you have a secret crush, or are totally in love, that’s also going to be pretty obvious. You can’t hide those types of strong emotions and it will complicate life. Things might be said. Gestures might be given and interpreted, feelings developed one way or another. It can’t be helped.

Having your characters close gives them no choice but to interact. People just don’t sit in a room and ignore each other. Well, I guess they could but then you wouldn’t have a story. When people are thrown together, whether it’s a stressful situation, a work situation or a manufactured situation, they have to interact. It gives you room to explore characters’ emotions and personal growth. You can’t fall in love with someone, not in the mind-blowing, earth-shattering, life-changing sense of the word and be the same. We are emotional beings.

The final and most important point in keeping your characters close is that it gives you the ability to grow the romance. Love has to grow when people react to each other. They find things out about each other, they like them more, and like turns into love, and then into a life-changing force that they can’t exist without because if they did, they wouldn’t be the same person. Love can’t stay the same, and that’s where your story is. I love exploring the whys and wherefores of people’s actions and reactions, warts and all.

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If you fall in love with a person, you accept the person for who they really are and people are far from perfect and that’s what I love to write about. Close proximity just adds to the enjoyment of the story!

In my new book Take Me As I Am, due for release on February 25, my characters are thrown together and have to live in a pretty close, intense situation. In this book, I wanted to turn the tables on the rich man/ordinary gal plot and so made my heroine a billionaire’s daughter, having been groomed for luxury and educated in the best schools money could buy, and my hero a sexy, hard-working, salt-of-the-earth man. She’s on a strict time line and he has to stay onsite to get the job done. My favourite scene is when my hero strips off his shirt in the hot summer sun, and my heroine can’t ignore the sizzle in her blood or the voice in her head that tells her that what her body wants is a bad idea. A very bad idea. See? Close proximity brings out things that make my characters uncomfortable. But that’s all part of the fun!

A small town romance sent against the romance of the beautiful Dandenong mountains about loss, lies, and the courage to live true.

First Loves (the real, slightly embarrassing kind)

Posted on July 24, 2015 by escapepublishingblog

by Charmaine Ross

I’m going to be honest. I have compiled a list of my first loves – the very first – that more or less, I fell in love with in Primary School. Yes, I had eyes in my head even then, even if my tastes were somewhat to be desired.

I guess being a girl of about ten or so and having no-idea-whatsover about men and anything that they entailed, I relied on my first point of call. The television screen. Yes, these ‘real-life men’ taught me a lot about what to expect when I started dating.

For one thing, I thought that all dates would consist of flying around the world in a super-sonic jet (at least), if not defeating a world-class villain or two. There might even be an inter-dimensional restaurant we might have stopped in for some refreshments during life-and-death duels because you have to be practical – you will get hungry doing all that stuff.

The ‘men’ that could accommodate me in said adventures were the following:

Mark, from the five-member superhero team called G-Force from Battle of the Planets, who defend Earth and its space colonies from the threat of planet Spectra. I would settle for no less than being called on as the sixth member of the team and having the chance to also defend Earth shoulder to shoulder with Mark. I loved his big blue eyes that would see into my soul. Unfortunately, he was also a cartoon character. And before you judge, one of my friends also confided that she also fell in love with Mark, so I wasn’t the only one.
Buck Rogers from the eighties television series. On a date with him, which I now know could last a while, I would sleep the next five hundred years, run about in a skin-tight white body-suit, (because didn’t everyone from the future wear clothes like that?), and go on big adventures in space and defeat the criminals of the future with good ol’ fashioned thinking and wit.
I also fell in love with Indiana Jones, and I will also mention his alter-ego Han Solo. Or did I just fall in love with the young Harrison Ford? Not sure. Adventure would also be on the cards on these dates and if I was lucky I might discover an ancient artefact or a remote village that had never seen white people before. Either one could happen; I didn’t care which. 4. Oh, there was also Flash Gordon from the movie in the eighties played by Sam J Jones. I just loved his washboard abs and blank eyes. Not much going on up top, but with a bod like his, who cares! Content of our date? Adventure. Space. Defeating villains. The same old spiel.

Surprisingly enough, I didn’t have any crushes on real life boys at school. They were dirty and a little bit too smelly for my sophisticated tastes. No footy players (they were a bit muddy as well), no sports heroes, no real-life individuals at all. I was a girl with selective tastes and any boy who took me out on a date had to at least have a jet or a wormhole though time and space to entertain me.

Why did I crush on characters? Maybe because they were really, really safe for me to fall in love with. I could day-dream about all the things I could do to them, and they can do to me from the comfort of my couch.

The modern day me still reaches for the same safety my ten-year-old self did. There are dozens of characters in books and movies I go on adventures with nearly every day.

For example Aidan Turner from his role in ‘Poldark’ – quite frankly, have you seen that man without a shirt on?! And yes, that was the sound of me scooping up my jaw from the floor.I can devour him with my eyes open, dream about him with my eyes shut, and travel the depths of the world and beyond. It all happens inside my head. Dating this way is also extremely safe. I can stretch my boundaries in any way I want and it all remains private. I stay in my safe place. If my daughter wants to date this way until she’s thirty, I will be more than obliging.

I’m not saying that if Aidan Turner turned up on my doorstep with a space-craft and a star-chart I wouldn’t go in real-life, but I’m older than ten now. I’m allowed to go on real adventures. It’s my daughter’s turn to mind-play and day-dream from a safe distance. I’d like to think she’ll have her safe place for years to come and enjoy future books and movies, like her mother. After all, it’s the best way to date!

And the truth is I’m not the only woman who does this. Millions of women around the world get a little buzz from the characters they discover and read in romances of all categories. Don’t deny it!

That’s the reason these books exist and grow in popularity each and every day. So enjoy these characters. Do things to them you wouldn’t do in real-life. Go on adventures, claim your dreams. You’re allowed to. After all, it’s the safest thing you can do!

(editor: this was mine! Though I’ve since turned from my childish crush to a more *ahem* adult crush on Captain Picard 😉 )

A sexy, sugar-laden David vs Goliath story about a local bakery, a national chain, and what really matters.

Clover Loveday has worked hard to get her café Four-Leaf Clover up and running — her ticket out of an increasingly alarming financial situation and her dream come true. When she literally falls off her ladder into the arms of sexy-as-sin Liam Sinclair. The same Liam Sinclair who owns the new bakery being built just across the road…the new store by bakery chain Upper Crust owner! Clover decides then that no matter how nauseated she is about the idea, it is best keep your enemies close, rather than leave things to fate.

Liam has never put too much thought into the competition when he opens a new outlet, other than taking their customers and strengthening the Upper Crust brand. But here in the beautiful Dandenong Ranges, Clover Loveday’s cafe is a little too close for comfort, and Clover herself a little too good-looking. So Liam asks his PA to put together a ’fact sheet’ about his new competition. He has a business to run, a father to please, and hundreds of people to keep in jobs. Surely information can keep an unwanted strong sexual pull at bay…

A sweet, caffeinated, satisfying story about unexpected temptations, forgiveness, and putting love before money.

Why is the Future so Exciting?

Posted on June 5, 2015 by escapepublishingblog

by Charmaine Ross

My first foray into The Future was through Buck Rogers, the television series in the eighties – yes I am showing my age. My head filled with moments of wonder and excitement when I watched those images flashing across the TV screen. Imagine my absolute glee when I managed to track down the series on DVD. I ordered them all, sat through the first episode and realised that my adult brain didn’t quite enjoy it as much as my ten year old brain did… Oh well, it was made in the eighties!

However, my imagination and excitement hasn’t changed since I was ten. I still anticipate days ahead with a certain amount of positivity. Why, I wonder? Days ahead, whether they be just around the corner or fifty years down the road are filled with promise and possibilities. They are an open slather, unmarred, unbruised, and filled with hope for better, happy days. They haven’t been lived yet, so no mistakes have been made, no bad things have happened, where everything across the board in my life has the same amount of potential. And I tend to flavour the future with optimism.

I can make of them what I want. The decisions I make today will shape the days, weeks, years ahead, whether it be in the long term, or just for tomorrow. I can create my days ahead simply by putting things into motion today. Then tomorrow I can build on what I’ve done today and keep building, keep creating. I plan for the best and hope that they will turn out how I imaged. Whether this is just wishful thinking, I don’t know, I only know that I enjoy planning my future. It’s an exciting, ever-changing reel of vision.

I’m also excited about the prospect of technology. I can’t imagine that my life in fifty years time will contain the same things as it does now. Maybe computers will be able to connect straight to my brain and I won’t have to key in words and correct my constant typos. Maybe we’ll have robots to cook, clean, wash – all of the things that I personally hate doing. Maybe we can plug intelligence into our brains and learn extraordinary amounts of information in an eighth of the time it currently takes now – and we’ll remember everything we read. Maybe we’ll create a pill that will keep us healthy, looking like we’re twenty when we’re actually one hundred. Maybe we’ll then live to be two hundred years old and still be able to hop, skip and jump until the day we pass onto the next world.

I mustn’t forget, however, how important yesterday is. Filled with golden nuggets of learning, precious gems of memories, even the not-so-good ones. Don’t underestimate the power of the not-so-good days. In reality they have been your best friends, shaping who you are today. Without them, you might not know how to handle that difficult situation, not know how grief feels in order to prepare yourself, you might not know how it feels to lose so that next time you can try harder, faster, study that little bit more, strive that little bit harder. How many times have you asked yourself, ‘If I only knew now what I didn’t know then, I would have done things a lot differently.’ – I’ve said that to myself more than a few times. In reality my one word – duh – says it all in moments like those. Oh, I know them well.

Then again, maybe I just like day-dreaming…

But without daydreams and imagination, there can be no future. Is that why I like sci-fi/futuristic/time travel romps so much? Absolutely. I only know that the future is open slather filled with promises, excitement and possibilities.

Charmaine’s most recent novel features a woman who puts everything on the line for the hope of a better future – until a dangerous adversary moves to town and threatens everything she hopes for.

A sexy, sugar-laden David vs Goliath story about a local bakery, a national chain, and what really matters.

A sweet, caffeinated, satisfying story about unexpected temptations, forgiveness, and putting love before money.

Don’t Be Perfect. Fall in Love.

Posted on December 16, 2014 by escapepublishingblog

by Charmaine Ross.

I’m a realistic, and I know I’m not model material. Never have been. Never will be. I don’t expect my heroines to be perfect either, and in a real world nobody expects anybody to be perfect. So why then, so we expect to read about perfectly formed barbie-body women in our books? Is it because we prefer it? Is it because we think our heroes won’t fall in love with a woman unless they have a perfect super-model figure? That they have to be perfect in every way otherwise no-one will even like them?

What I do know is that glossy magazines and Photoshop have a lot to answer for. We have created bodies to be an unrealistic product, to be moulded just as one would a mug on a pottery wheel, or a toy for a toy-shop. Bodies are not like that, and neither are women. Most are not the height of a model, or the wafer thin size that goes with it. Most women I know are people with tempers, a sweet-tooth, anxious, happy, joyous, hard-workers. They get sad, they get excited. They do not strut down a cat-walk in uncomfortable clothing, nor do they aspire to. In fact, they want more from life. Much more.

Then why this phenomena? Why do women think that they have to be perfect to be worthy of falling in love? That they must starve themselves to be so thin, and only then will they catch the eye of a man? That they don’t go into a melt down because they’ve slipped the gym for the day because some magazine told them they have to work out six times a week, keep a neat house, work a high-paying full time job, have two point five kids that are well-behaved, get them to their sporting activities each night after school and have a nutritious meal on the table every night? Does that sound like something well-rounded women want, or is it because we’ve been told from an early age that if we don’t do these things that we are unworthy. And no-one wants to be unworthy. Because if you are unworthy, you won’t be loved.

This makes love a leverage to be used as currency and love was never meant to be anything like that. Love is a gift. It is meant to enhance your life, make you feel good, comfort you when you are sad, be joyous when you are happy. It grows with you. Touches your soul. Tells you that you are a worth-while person even though you might have been cross, or angry, or tired. Because if you do all of those things the magazines tell you to do, you will be tired. And guess what, you probably won’t have time to fall in love, or enjoy all of the good things that go with it.

Women don’t have to be perfect to fall in love. Most men aren’t, and they get to have good women fall in love with them every day. After all, people are more interesting when they are sad, and angry and tired. That’s when things start to happen. That’s when people reach out for other people, they need to connect, they need to talk and laugh and get to know another person. And that’s when they fall in love. When you are not perfect and you reach out, you let another person in. And that gives love a chance to grow.

So don’t be perfect. Don’t even try. Life and love is more interesting that way.

Charmaine’s novel Makeover Miracle about a decidely imperfect heroine and her imperfect hero is currently free on Amazon!

Abbey Miller and her friend Jennifer have been picked from a live audience to take part in reality television show Makeover Miracle. This is Abbey’s worst nightmare, and brings back deep memories of being teased and the brunt of cruel jokes. The last thing Abbey wants is her soul to be laid bare for the whole of Australia to see, but being the true friend she is, she agrees to help Jennifer, who desperately wants to change her life.

Quinn Campbell, the producer of Makeover Miracle can see Abbey crumbling live on stage, and after she vomits into a waste paper basket, goes to her aid, not expecting see such a sad, haunted look in her eyes. There’s something about Abbey that reaches out to him. The look in her eyes brings back long buried memories of his sister and his failure as a brother to help her.

This is a story about one woman’s journey through harsh emotional abuses and the man who is able to make her believe in herself. Set against the beautiful Dandenong Ranges, Makeover Miracle is a story about forgiveness, understanding, personal growth and, of course, falling in love with that one special person.

See what’s blossoming in May – just in time for Mother’s Day!

Posted on May 1, 2014 by escapepublishingblog

Kicking us off this month is a favourite author going in new directions – Fiona Palmer introduces us to Jas, and the secret, shadowy world of the MTG Agency in this contemporary, action-adventure, YA/NA series debut!

Next, we’re thrilled to welcome Alison Stuart to the Escape family with this beautiful, pastoral regency about a woman who’s just escaped one dismal marriage, and has no interest in ever entering into another…if only her husband’s heir wasn’t quite so appealing.

Dark, violent, gripping, enthralling, thoroughly addictive – we’d never read anything like Daniel de Lorne‘s debut novel – the novel to read if you prefer your vampires to actually have bite.

Looking for something short and very sweet? May we recommend Jane O’Reilly’s latest – lovely – story about best friends on the cusp of something more – if only one of them dares to take that next step.

One of Escape’s best-loved contemporary authors, Elisabeth Rose, moves into Romantic Suspense this month with a gripping, harrowing tale about a mob widow, and what she’s willing to do to protect her son.

Trust us – after reading this fantastic corporate-set contemporary romance by debut author Alexa Bravo, you’ll never look at elevators the same way again!

Hot, steamy, sensual – suspenseful, this debut Romantic Suspense novel from debut author Wendy L Curtis takes on the people smugglers of Papua New Guinea, featuring an intrepid investigative journalist, a Federal Policeman, and one major one-night misunderstanding.

Last, but definitely not least, we welcome back Charmaine Ross with a fun, flirty contemporary romance, a David v Goliath story that celebrates the beauty that is Melbourne’s cafe culture.

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Tag Archives: charmaine ross

Feed Your Reader: new Feb releases

Forced Proximity: bringing out your best (and worst)

First Loves (the real, slightly embarrassing kind)

Why is the Future so Exciting?

Don’t Be Perfect. Fall in Love.

See what’s blossoming in May – just in time for Mother’s Day!