We are excited to celebrate the release of PLAYING THE PAUSES by Michelle Hazen. This is the second installment in her Sex, Love, and Rock & Roll series. Follow the tour for reviews, excerpts, guest posts, plus enter to win a $50 Amazon gift card!

“Hazen’s use of the frantic energy of a rock band’s tour contrasts perfectly with the slow and seductive dance this couple engages in. Readers are sure to enjoy following The Red Letters on their drama-fueled climb to fame. “ —RT Book Reviews

“To call Playing the Pauses an erotic novel alone would be to belie its equally strong explorations of the boundaries between personal, career, and sexual growth.” —Midwest Book Review

When an ultra-independent tour manager meets the one musician she can’t resist, their kinks fit together perfectly, but their lives don’t. Michelle Hazen is back with PLAYING THE PAUSES, the second, stand-alone installment in her Sex, Love, and Rock & Roll series. Fans of Kylie Scott’s Stage Dive Series and YOU REALLY GOT ME by Erika Kelly, will love this bad boy, friends with benefits romance with a dash of BDSM mixed in.

Title: Playing the Pauses

Author: Michelle Hazen

Release Date: March 5, 2018

Publisher: Self-published

Series: Sex, Love, and Rock & Roll #2

Genres: Contemporary Romance

Page Count: 290

Rock Star Dom + his Queen of the Spreadsheet employee = KRYPTONIT

Kate is a globe-trotting tour manager who can’t be tied down.

Danny is a Dominant rock star and tattoo artist who needs her help to explore his true kinks.

Kate just got her big break, running an international tour for a rising band. Her job is everything to her…at least until she meets the band’s enigmatic bass player.

After they collide in one unforgettably erotic night on a hotel balcony, he comes to her with a proposition. As a former BDSM club performer, Danny’s spent so long fulfilling other people’s fantasies that now he wants to reclaim his own—and he says she’s the only one who can help.

Getting caught in bed with her rock star boss could cost her career, and yet there’s something about Danny’s quiet intensity that she can’t resist. He steals her heart, hard. But the end of the tour is approaching, and their jobs are headed two different directions.

To be together one of them will have to stop touring, but the only thing they crave as much as each other is music.

** This book can be read and understood as a standalone, but does contain spoilers for earlier books in the series. **

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About Michelle Hazen:

Michelle Hazen is a nomad with a writing problem. Years ago, she and her husband ducked out of the 9 to 5 world and moved into their truck. As a result, she wrote most of her books with solar power in odd places, including a bus in Thailand, a golf cart in a sandstorm, and a beach in Honduras. Currently, she’s addicted to The Walking Dead, hiking, and Tillamook cheese.

Guest Post

The Inspiration Behind Playing the Pauses

The funny thing about Danny is that he already existed.

With most of my characters, I start with a glimmer and then start to fill it out. Brainstorm flaws, hobbies, the unique way they speak. This time, I invented Jera for A Cruel Kind of Beautiful (Book 1) and the first thing I knew about her was that she was a drummer and her best friend was a bassist who was also a tattoo artist and his name was Danny. Just like that, all those pieces of information wound up together like it was a single fact. Like they were a single fact. I didn’t even know Jera’s name at that point but I knew Danny’s.

He came fully formed. I always knew exactly what he would do; the challenge was explaining it to other people because he doesn’t think like anyone else. Half the time, he doesn’t think at all. His brain is this silent, beautiful plane. It’s why I didn’t write his book from his perspective: it wouldn’t make any sense. I had to let Kate tell it for him. There’s a novella later in the series half-told from his perspective and it’s an utterly exotic experience. Remember that old movie Being John Malkovich? It’s like that. It’s tourism into the brain of a person so different from you and I that it’s hard to comprehend.

The most frustrating thing about Danny is that he’s an artist and I know what his tattoos look like. They’re described in his book and they sound so pretty but I myself can’t draw a stick figure without a ruler. Which means all those gorgeous tattoo designs are always going to stay locked up in my head with no way to get out.

It’s also frustrating that I always know WHAT he does, but sometimes it takes me a bit of time to get him to tell me WHY.

Like for instance, Danny’s a vegetarian who hates vegetables. And fruit. I always knew that, from his first scene where he walks in eating Cheetos, but I didn’t know why until I wrote his book and I literally watched my fingers type the story behind his vegetarianism without having any idea what I was about to say (It’s a crazy weird story, too, you guys).

Danny’s real in a way none of my other characters quite are, and that would creep me out if it didn’t feel so…utterly natural.

Book Details:

Book Title: Twofer Murder by Lauren Carr
Category: Adult fiction, 400 pages
Genre: Mystery
Publisher: Acorn Book Services
Release date: November 17, 2017
Tour dates: Dec 4 to Jan 19, 2018
Content Rating: PG + M (Please be aware that TWOFER MURDER is a murder mystery. There are depictions of murder and some violence–though easy on the gore contents. No f-words but there may be some mild profanity, and mild religious expletives such as “damn”, “hell” and “Oh God!”. Some depictions of brief sexual content (kissing). No drug use or underage drinking among the protagonists.)

Book Description:

Twofer murder? What’s a twofer murder?

Twofer Murder is a treat for fans of best-selling author Lauren Carr’s fast-paced mysteries! Lauren’s latest novel contains the main characters from her three successful series: Mac Faraday, Lovers in Crime, and Thorny Rose mysteries. The guys go away for a fishing weekend only to get caught up in the murder of a journalist investigating fraud at a timber company. Meanwhile, the ladies are spending the weekend in the presidential suite at a posh resort where Jessica Faraday is to accept a lifetime achievement award for her late grandmother at a murder mystery writers conference. But before they have time to get their facials, they get wrapped up in their own real mystery when an up and coming author ends up dead!

Lauren Carr’s Twofer Murder is a 2-for-1—making it a must-read for any mystery fan!

To read more reviews, please visit Lauren Carr’s page on iRead Book Tours.

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Meet the Author:

Lauren Carr is the international best-selling author of the Mac Faraday, Lovers in Crime, and Thorny Rose Mysteries—over twenty titles across three fast-paced mystery series filled with twists and turns!

Book reviewers and readers alike rave about how Lauren Carr’s seamlessly crosses genres to include mystery, suspense, romance, and humor.

Lauren is a popular speaker who has made appearances at schools, youth groups, and on author panels at conventions. She lives with her husband, and three dogs on a mountain in Harpers Ferry, WV.

Connect with the author: Website ~ Twitter ~ Facebook ~ Instagram

What are readers saying about Lauren Carr’s mysteries?

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Guest Post: When to Let Go of Your Book

By Lauren Carr

Several months ago, I rejected a project in which an author asked me to edit his book. Not only did I turn down the job because my schedule does not allow me to edit other authors’ books anymore, but there was another reason I had turned down the project.

The first installment in a trilogy, the book had already been edited and released to the public to favorable reviews. Two years later, readers of this first book were waiting for the next installment, which the writer had still not finished. However, instead of focusing on completing the second book, he had decided to go back to work on the first—already completed and released—book.

Note that the changes this author wanted to make were not glaring grammatical errors that he wanted me to correct. Rather, a year or so after the book’s release, he had picked it up again and started reading it and decided that he could “fine-tune” it.

Frankly, this is not an uncommon problem with some writers. Just the other day I saw where the author of one book, which had been released three years ago, announced that he had just received his first shipment of this same book: “Revamped and Re-Released.”

Why? I wondered. This book had received a ton of good reviews. Why has he not moved on to write another book?

Some writers simply have a problem letting go.

Just like how some writers have a problem focusing on one project to its completion, other writers have the opposite problem. They can’t let go and walk away after having written the words “The End.”

There’s always at least one or two writers who can’t let go of “their baby” (as I heard one writer describe it) when I teach a novel writing class. They are easy to spot. They have a book inside them that they have been working on for five, ten, fifteen, or even twenty years.

I can still remember the very first thing I learned about writing on my first day of college. It was in my first writing class that my journalism professor said, “Writers never finish a project. They quit working on it.”

He went on to explain that a writer can edit, re-write, revise, and proofread an article, short story, or book over and over again, and still find sections that can be fine tuned or corrections to be made. That’s why professional writers must set a deadline in which they force themselves to walk away from the project—at which point they aren’t necessarily done, but rather they have let it go to move onto their next project.

This is why writers who don’t let go, walk away, and never look back will continue to write, edit, rewrite, re-edit, proofread one single book for their whole lives. Because—

In reality, it is impossible to finish writing a book.

Serious writers learn to let their books go. Admittedly, this can be very difficult—especially for those writers who view their books as “babies.” I once read an article by an editor who explained very simply, “It’s not a baby. It’s a book.”

Here’s a few pointers for writers who want to become prolific authors with more than one, twenty-year-old unfinished novel under their belt:

Set a deadline to finish your book. I have been told that writers with a journalism background learn early on how to let go. They are forced to due to tight deadlines. I was trained to get a project done by my deadline and then let it go, walk away, and then start on the next book. As a full-time author, I still work on self-imposed deadlines.
Make each round of editing and proofreading count. Remember that you will always find sections that can be “fine-tuned” every time you go through your book. With this in mind, set a limit of how many times you will read through your project and when you do, be ruthless in your search for errors.

Every writer is different. Personally, after completing the rough draft, I go through a manuscript to rewrite it. Then, I will edit it. After editing, I send it to my editor. (While my current work in progress is with the editor, I will start working on my next book.) Then, after going through the edits, I will proofread the book after layout. That is five times that I will go through a book.

Once your book is released, don’t look back. Move onward! Unless you discover that your book has a big glaring flaw, resist the urge to read through it again. (Once, six weeks after a book was released, I was contacted by a reader who discovered that I had a city in the wrong country. This mistake was missed by two editors and a proofreader! I simply corrected that error—resisting the urge to look any further, and re-released the book.)

I guarantee, when you go back to look at a book you wrote a few years ago, you will definitely think, “Gee, I could have done that better,” Or “I should have done that.” Yes, every writer does that.

But, the pros who have more than one twenty-year-old unfinished book under their belt, they let each book go, direct their attention on the next book, and never look back.

They move on.