This is my stop during the blog Tour for The Best Part of Me by Jamie Hollins. This blog tour is organized by Lola’s Blog Tours. The blog tour runs from 10 till 23 October, you can view the tour schedule here.

The Best Part of Me (McKenna #1)

by Jamie Hollins

Genre: Contemporary Romance

Age category: Adult

Release Date: September 20, 2016

Blurb:

He’s content to stay in the shadows…

Ewan McKenna’s days and nights are filled with drink orders, beer kegs, and noisy bar customers. Now that he’s put his tumultuous past behind him, he’s more than happy to live a solitary existence running his family’s pub. After years of walking the line between good and bad, Ewan now needs control and order to rest peacefully at night. What he doesn’t need is the fiery, intriguing woman who’s found her way into his thoughts and his bed.

She’s ready to step back into the light…

Spending the summer getting her hands dirty in her aunt’s garden in a tiny town outside Boston is exactly what Quinn Adler needs. She’s ready to shake off the grief of losing the people who meant the most to her and to start feeling again. What she doesn’t expect is to find a man who sets all her senses on fire. When the pieces seem to be nearly in place for a bright future, everything falls apart.

Will Quinn’s love be bright enough to cut through the darkness of Ewan’s past?

You can find The Best Part of Me on Goodreads

You can buy The Best Part of Me here:

• Amazon

• Amazon UK

• B&N

• Kobo

Guest Post

Hello!  I’m super excited to be writing a guest post for I Heart My Life today.  Thank you so much for having me!

My debut novel, THE BEST PART OF ME, was published on September 20, 2016.  It’s the first book in my McKenna Series and circles around Quinn and Ewan’s struggle to let go of their pasts and not let regret dictate their futures.  Though the story gets emotional at times, there are plenty of funny and steamy parts as well.

The long journey to pen my first novel began about four years ago on a vacation to Ireland.  My husband and I decided to drive ourselves through the southern part of the country taking in the sights, trying to stay out of the perpetual mist that seemed to be following us around, and truly having the best time.  We stayed at one B & B outside of Killarney in County Kerry that was particularly charming.  The countryside was enchanting, and I began thinking what it might be like to live in such a place.

It was there that my heroine, Quinn Adler, started to come to life in my mind.

With my husband’s encouragement, I signed up for a twelve week online romance writing course.  Our group met every Wednesday night, and I used the ideas floating around in my head from my vacation in Ireland for the basis of the story for that course.  I didn’t quite get the entire manuscript finished by the end of class, but I had a good enough start that I was motivated to finish.

It was around that time that my personal life impeded on my new writing hobby (as personal life has a tendency to do!).  The pressure of my fulltime job was getting to the point where it was starting to affect my health.  To make a long story short, the stresses of work and life had manifested themselves into something called Vasovagal Syncope.  Fatigue or other triggers caused a drastic drop in blood pressure which would cause me to lose consciousness, resulting in seizure like symptoms.  I had my driver’s license taken away for fourteen months while doctors did all types of tests on me.  Most of those fourteen months the doctors were convinced I had epilepsy.  Then they discovered that it wasn’t my brain that was the problem, but my heart.  In the end, I got a pacemaker and my life was finally able to return to normal.

I reduced my hours at work and was ready to tackle my WIP. Then—surprise!—I got pregnant. Although I was able to write during my pregnancy, I didn’t quite have the momentum to finish THE BEST PART OF ME until well after our son was born.

But finish it, I did!

I made so many changes during my revisions, cut out so many chapters (some of which I’m still sad about!), rewrote the black moment about five times, and actually changed the setting of the story from Ireland to the United States.  I came to the conclusion that I didn’t know near enough about the Irish culture to do it justice so I moved the fictional town of Ballagh to outside of Boston, MA.  Killarney was changed to Boston.  Cork was switched to Providence, RI.  The Gap of Dunloe was changed to the Blue Hills Reservation.  Eventually, everything fell into place.

Once I had decided that I would self-publish, I got to work on lining up a copy editor, a formatter, a website designer, and a graphic designer to help with my cover.  The to-do list to self-publish is a really long one, but in the end, it was definitely the right decision for me.

From start to finish, it took about four years to write, revise and self-publish THE BEST PART OF ME.  Quinn and Ewan are finally getting a chance to tell their story, and I couldn’t be happier.  Along the way I’ve had so much support from my family and friends.  My critique partner was a wealth of information, not to mention instrumental in helping me finish the book. And I have the world’s best hubster who was so encouraging from the word GO!

I guess what I really take away from this whole process isn’t how long it took me to get here, but just the fact that I got here.  Period. I’m super excited to share this story with you all, and I hope that it finds a place amongst the favorites on your bookshelf!

About the Author:

Jamie Hollins was born and raised in rural Northeast Ohio. After graduate school, she embarked on a perilous career in Human Resources where she met plenty of real life characters. When she’s not writing or chasing after her toddler, she enjoys reading and golfing. Jamie lives in Pennsylvania with her husband, son, and their dog, Winston.

You can find and contact Jamie here:

• Website

• Facebook

• Twitter

• Goodreads

• Pinterest

• Instagram

Giveaway

There is a tour wide giveaway for the blog tour of The Best Part of Me. One winner will win a 50$ amazon gift card and a signed copy of The Best Part of Me by Jamie Hollins. This giveaway is open international.

For a chance to win, enter the rafflecopter below:

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Filed under: Life Tagged: guest post, jamie hollins, lola blog tours, The Best Part of Me