Blatant Self-Promotion (BSP)

I mentioned last week (or maybe longer ago) that I was going to start publicizing my novels on this blog once a week. I've decided that Saturday would be the day. I have been bolstered by the blogs that are nothing but advertising -- health products, insurance, other products.

I write romances. The ones that are available now are electronically published, with a few print copies for people who read paper books. I've already told you about ONCE AGAIN A PRINCESS which is published by Hard Shell Word Factory .

My other publisher is Awe-Struck E-Books and the first book of mine that they published was THE HARDEST STEP. The challenge that I gave myself was to break the rule of having the hero and heroine meet in the first chapter. They meet on the telephone, which evens the playing field, so to speak, because the heroine had been crippled in an accident and is just now at a point in her recovery that she is considering going back out into the world to find a job. Understandably, she is apprehensive.

The hero is a self-assured construction engineer who is a bit of a world traveler, new to town and needing someone to steer him to places he needs to go. She seems to have all the answers for him, which stirs some feelings of gratitude. He'd like to take her to dinner, but she tells him very little about herself. Yet all the clues he runs across lead to the same place, a group home.

Awe-Struck books publishes some books about physically challenged protagonists. One of the co-owners is a man who is a retired college professor who had polio as a child and is suffering the long-range effects of it now. He told me that there is one scene in the book, when I write about the physical stress the heroine experiences, that was so on target that it raised the hair on the back of his neck.

So, THE HARDEST STEP is not just to get over the accident and out into the world again. What is it?