If both ladies could email me via my website (www.sarahmayberry.com) I will get a book in the mail to them ASAP. Thanks for chatting,everyone. As always, I loved hearing your stories.

Original post:
In case you hadn’t been popping by regularly, I have a book out! Yay. As I mentioned in last month’s post, I love having a book out because it means I have reader letters coming my way, and reader letters make my day. Sometimes, they make my week, and if they’re very special, my month.

But I digress. This month, I wanted to talk about taking risks. The heroine in Hot Island Nights – my September Blaze – is what you might call slightly uptight. A real good girl, well behaved, well spoken, polite, deferential to her elders… You get the picture. She’s also more than a little repressed, mostly because the one time she tried to tell her fiance and soon-to-be husband what she wanted in the bedroom department, he got all stuffy and respectful and patronizing on her. Elizabeth was left feeling foolish and a little smutty for wanting what she wanted – which, you know, in the Blaze world was really pretty vanilla.

But things come to a head in Elizabeth’s life when she learns that the man she thought was her father is not her father – he was, in fact, her stepfather. It seems that while she’s believed both her parents have been dead for many years, she still has a living parent out there in the world. This shocking news, and the fact that her fiance has known this secret and colluded with her grandparents to keep this information from her gives Elizabeth the kick in the pants she needs to take charge of her own life.

She calls off her engagement. Then she flies from London to Australia in search of her birth father. She winds up on a small island off the coast of Victoria, Philip Island, but instead of meeting her father at the address she’s been given, she finds Nathan Jones. And he’s wearing nothing but a towel and a hangover and a hell of a lot of grumpy bear attitude.

I don’t think I’m giving too much away by saying that first encounter doesn’t go, shall we say, well. But when they meet again at the local pub that night, things are a little different. Elizabeth is forced to acknowledged that she finds Nathan very, very sexy. And he can’t stop looking at her and thinking about her, even though he knows she’s got “complicated” written all over her, and for his own reasons he’s not up for complicated right now.

Elizabeth is faced with a choice at the end of that evening – let an opportunity to explore other aspects of herself walk out the door (literally) or grab hold of the challenge with both hands and go for it. She takes the plunge, and even though things get rocky before they get good, it’s the best decision of her life.

All of this got me thinking – would I have been as brave as Elizabeth if I was presented with such a big life challenge? I’m not sure I would. I’ve done my share of semi-brave things in my life – moved countries twice, spoken at big public events, launched a new magazine – but I don’t know that I would have the courage to turn my life upside down the way Elizabeth does.

What about you? Are you a risk taker? Or do you prefer to indulge your love of challenge and risk between the pages of a book? Or are you a mixture of both – a sometimes-risk taker who likes to walk on the wildside within the pages of someone else’s story as well? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this subject. And I’ll be giving away 2 copies of Hot Island Nights to 2 random posters, so don’t be shy! I’m really looking forward to your stories and responses on this one.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 5th, 2010 at 6:00 am and is filed under Sarah Mayberry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.