The Penthouse Prince by Virginia Nelson - Guest Post

Hey, thanks so much for having me today!

I gave a lot of thought to how to explain a day in the writing life of me because I think I’d like to pretend it is super organized and I know what I’m doing. Sadly, like a lot of people, I spend my days putting out fires, rushing from one minor emergency to the next, doing my job, being with family, and sometimes I even catch my favorite shows…but I’ll try.

I get up around six the first time, which is when the alarm clock plays the Dr. Who theme song. My youngest is up around this time and he’s not a big morning person—which means he is cranky and snarly and I either try to joke him out of it before the bus driver has to deal with his morning mood or I steer clear of him and wish the driver the best. I’m no saint…but some days I manage to have him giggling when he goes out the door.

About then, the cats are going bonkers and stalking back and forth across my desk because they are starving to death and, dear god, does no one in this house understand the importance of their food? Our dog, a black lab, generally alternates between tripping me—we’re still pre-coffee—and knocking stuff over. There has been serious discussion about entering his tail in some kind of professional fighting organization…that thing is a lethal weapon.

By eight, I’m poking my older two kids (eighteen and sixteen in May) and reminding them to get up and eat breakfast so they can be logged into their online school by nine. More grumbling and two more zombies rise to stumble around our house knocking stuff over. I own a lot of plastic—a lot a lot. We’re not graceful creatures, but we own it. By nine, I like to be at my desk, preferably with noise canceling headphones on and whatever soundtrack has captured my fancy that week playing, and I work until noonish. Depending on the day, ‘work’ means answering emails, checking kids school stuff online, taking phone calls, paying bills, crying over student loan debt, writing blogs, editing, plotting, revisiting the schedule, creating files…whatever.

At noonish, I break and panic because I have a class in about an hour. I quickly dig out my syllabus, see if anything was due, do whatever it was, and then get in the car and head to campus. While on campus, I sometimes remember to eat a granola bar. I’m usually home from school in the early afternoon, barring society meetings, and then back to work until about four or five.

Around then, I stare at the crock pot and wonder how serious the recipe is about six hours of cooking time and if maybe two hours on high will work…one way or another, dinner happens. I talk to my kids for a bit before heading back to the office around sevenish. I work until nine—bedtime for the school kids—when I remind everyone about showers, teeth, give them kisses and realize, nope…I never did get around to a shower myself.

But, wait…the house is quiet! So, after ensuring the dog has a rawhide and the cats are fed, it is my writing time (barring other deadlines) so I crack open the laptop with the plan to write just a few thousand words while singing along to show tunes—

Then the clock says four am and I fall into my bed, lost to other worlds, and sleep for a couple hours. Before I know it, the alarm is playing Dr. Who…

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Single mom Jeanie Long was trying to save her butt at work by reporting her manager to the company owner. Instead, she finds herself greeted warmly by gorgeous company CEO Camden James...and introduced to his father as his fiancée. Now she's been hired—complete with a hefty pay raise—to be the fake fiancée of the infamous “Penthouse Prince.”

Camden doesn't believe in love. He believes in mutually beneficial business arrangements. With his real fiancée off cheating on him, Camden needs someone to help him prove to his father that he's definitely ready to marry. Yet Jeanie's combination of beauty and bluntness act like an aphrodisiac, and their “for the press” kisses look incredibly real. So real that Jeanie and Camden are either really convincing actors...or they've fallen for their own charade.

Virginia Nelson believed them when they said, “Write what you know.” Small town girl writing small town romance, her characters are as full of flaws, misunderstandings, and flat out mistakes as Virginia herself. When she’s is not writing or plotting to take over the world, she likes to hang out with the greatest kids in history, play in the mud, drive far too fast, and scream at inanimate objects. Virginia likes knights in rusted and dinged up armor, heroes that snarl instead of croon, and heroines who can’t remember to say the right thing even with an author writing their dialogue. Her books are full of snark, sex, and random acts of ineptitude—not always in that order.

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