Thursday, July 28, 2016

FAVORITES, FAILURES & FRUSTRATIONS--GUEST AUTHOR DORA BRAMDEN

Award-winning Australian author Dora Bramden writes heart-melting, passionate romance. Learn more about her and her books at her website. 

What’s Great About Epic Fails?

I’ve had so many wrong turns in my life that I’ve come to expect them, even dare I say welcome them. At the time I feel like they’re some kind of retribution for a past life crime, but later I find they were there to move me on from a stuck in the muck position.

The first time this happened I was pregnant with my second child. My employer told me that because I’d been hired as a casual, I didn’t qualify for maternity leave and I wouldn’t be able to return to my part-time job. I really counted on that money and was incredibly upset. It was a community organisation and I assumed they’d be supportive of a young mother. Wrong! I made a big mistake not making sure my employment terms were agreed upon and had a signed contract.

From that epic fail I found out that I must be responsible and not assume others will look out for me. Also, after my son was born, I found work in another community organisation closer to home and with varied fun roles and greater opportunities. So I look back and think I was kind of lucky that bad time happened to me.

Much later when my children were grown, I was divorced, and succumbed to a terrible illness that had robbed me of my home, family, career, use of my legs and my thinking brain. Extremely lucky for me, I recovered, but there wasn’t much of my life left the way it used to be. I had to begin again. What was great about that was that my life was a clean slate. Everything that had been blocking me was also gone.

A lovely man came into my life and supported me through a long recovery; he’s still by my side, more than two and a half years later. Friends and family bore with peak hour traffic to visit me in a city hospital for weeks on end. At times, I couldn’t even talk to them but they kept coming in. I learned that I didn’t have to entertain people, or do things for them to have them want to be around me. I learned that I was enough.

At times I wanted to get better quickly, so desperately but timing is everything. I feel now that I’m better and living a life I love, that I needed to go through that time to be the person I am now. I wrote A Dance with the Laird before I became sick, and I edited it after I recovered. I rewrote some of it to include what I learned in my journey.

Natalie Baxter, my heroine, has made some epic fails; marriage to a man who appeared reliable and career focused led to tragedy. She still hasn’t learned and decides she will focus on her career, but jetlagged and lost she’s put on a collision course with the man who’ll challenge everything she believes about herself.

She’s decided to keep away from finding love but can’t resist the charms of Angus McLaren, AKA the Laird. Submitting to her attraction to him seems to be the worst thing she could do, but of course it is fate stepping in to help her out.

Angus has a great deal of responsibility resting on his shoulders. He too has made mistakes that have left him wary of love but he can’t resist helping someone out. He thinks falling in love is an epic fail, but caring Natalie is the woman to thaw the ice around his heart.

Epic fails and frustrations can turn out to be the very thing you need to get what your heart really wants.

A Dance with the Laird
Natalie Baxter’s sorrow is she can’t conceive a child. She’s devoting her event planning skills to helping orphans. Falling for Angus McLaren, Laird to an ancestral estate is a mistake. He must have an heir to secure it, and the family foundation’s work with orphans in the third world. He can’t consider marrying Natalie, his beautiful event planner. He can, however, be her lover for the one month they have together, organising a charity ball.

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