Friday, June 16, 2017

Damage Control & Giveaway


Author: Eva King
Title: Damage Control
Release Date: May 27, 2017
Genre: Contemporary Romance
Publisher: Hot Tree Publishing
Cover Designer: Claire Smith

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Recovering from a broken relationship, Emma Mitchell moves in with her best friend. Her life is quiet and uneventful, just how she likes it. Little does she know that the events of the following months will change her life forever.

Famous Hollywood actor James McNair is a renowned womaniser with a penchant for partying and hitting the tabloids for all the wrong reasons. When a night of partying a little too hard means he finally has to take stock and reevaluate his lifestyle, a week away from the flashing lights of Hollywood is just what he needs. What better place to hide than in his childhood home in Edinburgh, Scotland?

When the old friends are reunited, feelings resurface and sparks fly. But James must keep the pretence of his new persona until the premier of his biggest film in his career. He just has no idea if he'll be able to keep his feelings for Emma under wraps until then.

Sometimes it takes more than damage control to find a happily ever after.



What inspired me to write Damage Control
by Eva King

I can confess that I didn’t always want to be a writer. When I was younger, my dream was to be a teacher, to mould young minds and for them to love the classics--Romeo and Juliet, Little Women--as much as I did. But things don’t tend to happen the way you planned.

Even though I’ve always been a reader, I started writing after I read Twilight, by Stephenie Meyer. I was completely captivated by the love story, and when I read how she wrote the book with young children like me, I was inspired. If she could do it, so could I. The only difference was that I didn’t have a college degree.

The first novel I wrote ended up in the bin. I hated the main character, and let’s face it, it was utter crap. But it didn’t stop me. Just imagining my own world, the characters... created a monster in me that needed more. 

I went to the library and borrowed Stephen King’s On Writing, which I ended up buying. Here I learned that he didn’t become a best seller overnight, that he started by writing short stories. So I followed his steps, by writing a couple of stories--not the drinking--which were refused for being “Pulp Fiction”.

I didn’t want to write a classic or a masterpiece. I wanted to write something that I enjoyed reading and hopefully other people would too.

Finally a group of authors in Goodreads joined up and we wrote stories, providing every bit of royalties to charity. I didn’t get my name known or make any money of it,  but I learned a lot from other authors, which I still consider friends.

I started writing Damage Control when I saw the cover of The Times magazine, with Ryan Gosling. It made me wonder who was his first love, crush...that’s how James McNair was born. Out of curiosity.

I can’t say it was easy, it wasn’t. Everyone I spoke to, advised to plan the character, plan the scenarios. But I couldn’t. Planning in advance didn’t work for me.

The story would come to me by sitting in front of the computer, not before.

There were times where I would feel like what I was writing wasn’t worth it. That my lack of a degree showed in my words, so I left it for a while. Hidden in the depths of the computer, gathering fictional dust.

After reading Slammed by Colleen Hoover, she managed to write a whole novel after school clubs. It gave me hope.

So, I revived Damage Control, this time writing Emma’s point of view.

My main problem was writing on a Notebook, I needed to be connected online to be able to use Word. Leaving nighttimes, when everyone at home was asleep, to write.

That’s when I discovered that E L James, the author from Fifty Shades of Grey, wrote her novel on her Blackberry phone. I saved for what seemed like an eternity and bought a smart phone.

Thanks to this, I managed to finish Damage Control on my way to work, typing relentlessly on the phone until it was done.

Now, I’m not saying it wasn’t hard work. Nobody told me that writing a book was going to be easy, but I didn’t imagine it was going to be so hard. I suppose this is why most people call it an accomplishment. To me it was an achievement, a way to show that everything is possible if I worked hard enough.

Now that I’ve finished, I can’t wait to start another one.


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All other links: books2read.com/damagecontrol


Eva King was born in Spain. During her teenage years, she moved with her mother to Scotland, where she fell in love with the culture and one of its men.

She now lives in Barcelona with her husband, two children and a cat called Hamish.


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