Guest Blogger Phillipa Ashley - Where Do You Get Your Ideas?

Like all novelists, people often ask me, “Where do you get your ideas from?”

Some authors dread the question, but I don’t mind. The only problem is that the answer could be a very long one! That’s because most writers of contemporary romance draw their inspiration from almost anything and anyone.

Sometimes, the “hook” comes first for me. In It Should Have Been Me, one of my other books, I heard the old Yvonne Fair song on the radio and thought, “What if a jilted bride really did stand up in the church and try to stop the wedding?”

The idea for my book, Just Say Yes, came along when I heard about a man who’d proposed to girlfriend during an ad break in Veronica Mars. What if she’d said ‘no’ live on TV and humiliated him?

Fever Cure

Fever Cure is my brand new book released by Samhain this week. Here’s the cover which I think was designed by Kanaxa. I cried when I saw it, it captured the feverish feel of the book so well!

I first got the idea for Fever Cure when I was 18! I’m much older now and only started writing fiction six years ago. Yet the small experience that inspired the book made a deep impression on me.

It was way back when I was an undergraduate at Oxford. One day, I was in the library sitting opposite a handsome medical student. My friend told me that he was The Honourable X and the son of an earl. I was fresh from a state school, a working class girl, overwhelmed by the world of dreaming spires, grand colleges and my fellow students, many of them very wealthy and confident.

I was fascinated that such a privileged young man as the earl’s son wanted to be a doctor when he probably didn’t have to work at all.

I’m a lot older now and, I hope, a little wiser but the image of the aristocrat surrounded by medical textbooks never left me. So when I did start writing, I just had to tell ‘his’ fictional story.

Fever Cure is the story of the Honourable Doctor Tom Carew and a young teacher called Keira Grayson who’s taken some hard knocks in life. They are on fire for each other from the moment they meet at a friend’s wedding but both of them have very good reasons why taking the relationship further, let alone falling in love, would be disastrous.

This book is an emotional, intense read and probably my "hottest" story so far. There’s a lot of humour in it, like all my books, but I also hope it will make you cry before you get to the HEA.

Here’s the blurb

The road to heartbreak is paved with honorable intentions…

After a year dealing with her mum’s health scare and the end of a bad relationship, Keira Grayson was looking forward to kicking up her heels at her best friend’s wedding. Until she kicks off her (spare) knickers in front of the trifecta of perfection. Tom Carew. Son of an earl, honorable doctor and possibly the hottest man on the planet.

One look at Keira’s delightful embarrassment, and Tom’s hormone meter spins off the charts. Trouble is, his bags are already packed to return to the jungles of Papua New Guinea. He has patients waiting—and amends to make for a terrible choice that left devastation in its wake.

They both reason that indulging in a one-time dinner date won’t hurt…until their inhibitions melt away in the heat of their lethal sexual chemistry. Leaving Keira wondering if a sizzling fling is just what the doctor ordered, or another prescription for relationship disaster. And Tom fighting a battle against inner demons that could shatter both their hearts.

Product warnings

This book contains a hot aristocratic doctor, sparky heroine, new uses for a chaise longue, a steamy shower scene and a knicker-ripping encounter in a four-poster bed.

You can read an extract here at the Samhain site

http://store.samhainpublishing.com/fever-cure-p-6379.html

www.phillipa-ashley.com

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