Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Blog Tour: Guest Post + Giveaway with Alice Gaines! [INT]



WELCOME TO THE BLOG, ALICE! :)

I live in a funky, old house with my neglected orchids, a weird cat in the back yard, and my darling corn snake Casper the Friendly Ghost Corn Snake

 ^From Alice's blog :D
 
Where to Find Alice:

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Like everyone, writers have revenge fantasies.  The difference with us is that we can write them down, adding flourishes and turning points until we’ve thoroughly skewered people who make us angry.  The revenge I took in Mating Season didn’t involve skewering in the strictest sense, although if you put a sexual connotation on the word “skewer,” it might apply.  I do write erotic romance, after all.

Back in my graduate school days, I used to get into heated debates with a couple of male colleagues in the field of evolutionary psychology.  These were psychologists who theorized that our behavior was as much a product of evolution as our anatomy and physiology.  That all sounds pretty yawn-inducing except for the fact that much of the field was an attempt to explain the differences between how men and women behave.  My colleagues had used evolution to arrived at a “scientific” explanation for why men were dominant and women were submissive, and I don‘t mean that in an interesting velvet handcuffs way.

It went something like this:  Because men don’t have to give birth to babies or nurse them, they can create many, many children without having to do any of the dirty work afterward.  Therefore, a man’s best way to make sure lots of his DNA gets into the next generation is to gad about, sleeping with as many women as he can and leaving the women to take care off the consequences.  This, my colleagues claimed, explained harems in animals like the elk in Mating Season and also among some human men.

Women, on the other hand, have to carry the child for nine months and then spend months or years breast feeding them.  Because women are small and helpless (according to my male colleagues), their best strategy for taking care of themselves and their children is to attract a powerful man to provide and protect them.  Their DNA doesn’t benefit so much from having sex as it does from clinging to a man, somehow keeping him away from his real nature, which is something more like hanging out in clubs trying to get laid.

Mind you, they disguised all this BS in a lot of jargon like “adaptive strategies” and “evolutionary advantages,” but it pretty much boiled down to a self-serving depiction of women as frigid and manipulative and men as freewheeling playboys.  I wasn’t having it.  A group of five of us -- three men and two women -- met in a weekly two-hour seminar that ended up with the two unrepentant male superiority types and the two women screaming at each other and the reasonable man occasionally throwing in a fact or logical argument (bless him).  Because the professor was one of the cavemen, this wasn’t a fight I was going to win.  He gave me an acceptable grade, but the feelings of those screaming sessions stick with me still.

I walked away shaking my head.  The two cavemen had put forth and vigorously defended a lot of nonsense.  First, humans aren’t ruled by instincts the way other animals are.  We work with our brains.  Second, it’s patently ridiculous to suggest that men don’t love their children and want to be with them and make sure they have everything they need.  Third, if men are the hypersexual creatures, why are women the multi-orgasmic ones?  If we’re talking about a race to see who can have the most climaxes, a woman will have crossed the finish line before a man has laced up his running shoes.  I mean, really.

Many years later, I had the opportunity to write a story about two people stranded in a beautiful redwood forest.  There had to be a lot of sex, and love, involved, but there would also have to be conflict.  I thought about that seminar, and I realized that in fiction, I could make the woman dare the man to put his where his mouth was, , or perhaps more accurately where his words were.  I had her dare him to prove he had as active a sexual drive as she did in the most basic way possible -- by keeping up with her in bed and in the shower and in the forest.  I’ll bet you know who won.
~Alice Gaines

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Mating Season by Alice Gaines
Publisher: Avon Red (September 11, 2012)
Series: Cabin Fever,
Genre: Paranormal Romance

Being stuck together in a redwood forest can really bring your inner animal out . . .

The last thing Gayle Richards wanted was to spend days alone in a cabin with Nolan Hersch, fellow professor and macho loudmouth. How could she observe the animals' mating habits alongside a man who made her blood boil . . . and not just in anger? The only thing more frustrating than Nolan's opinions on male sexual superiority was how much he made her want to rip his clothes off.

Well, the thin air in the mountains must have gone to Gayle's head, because she sets up a challenge: three days to prove who's more insatiable in bed. With Gayle and Nolan making their best efforts to wear each other out, this may just be the sexiest experiment of all.
 

Where to Buy*:
More Info:




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One lucky commenter will win an E-ARC of Alice's next book, Mating Season!



To Enter:

Please leave a comment on the post WITH your email address. No email addy, no entry! [I need a way to contact you, and this makes it easier].




Giveaway ends Monday, August 20th! I'll announce the winner Tuesday--Good Luck! :)


Giveaway is now over. Thank you for you stopping by!

Winner contacted--elaing8

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Thanks for stopping by, Alice! :) Please know that you are welcome back anytime! I loved your post, I'm glad that you were able to pull from personal experiences while writing Mating Season! And I'm pretty sure we all know who won their wager...(Congrats, Gayle!) lol. I look forward to reading these novels, they sound great--and very steamy! :D


Enjoy! 



Until Next Time,
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*TBQ's Book Palace is a member of both the Amazon and Barnes and Nobles affiliates program. By using the links provided to buy products from either website, I receive a very small percentage of the order. To read my full disclosure on the matter, please see this post!

5 comments :

Texas Book Lover said...

WOW! This sounds different and great!

Thanks for the chance!
mmafsmith AT gmail DOT com

elaing8 said...

Alice is a new author to me.Enjoyed reading her post. Mating Season sounds really good.
elaing8(at)netscape(dot)net

erin said...

Thanks for a fun post! Not entering as I had preordered my copy and got it today :)

Love Alice's work!

The_Book_Queen said...

Oh, you will have to tell us what you think! I'm anxious to read Alice's books myself, but it may be a while before I have the time. Thanks for stopping by, erin!

Enjoy!
TBQ

DBookWhore said...

Awesome! Excited about this one!


Dprissypunk(at)gmail(com)